Justice Kagan’s Dissent and the Call to Abolish the Supreme Court

By Jim Dugan

Justice Elena Kagan (joined by Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Jackson) wrote an important dissenting opinion in Biden v. Nebraska—the recent Supreme Court case concerning student debt relief. It wasn’t important because it voiced the progressive minority view of a ruling which further enforced the state policy of a country whose identity is rooted in settler colonialism, capitalist inequality, and enslavement-turned-apartheid-turned-mass-incarceration.  These dissenting opinions have been consistent through time—sometimes they are left in the dustbins; sometimes they are invoked in subsequent opinions of more popularly progressive times to overturn (in liberal fashion) historically horrific policy.  Those are important.  But this isn’t what makes Kagan’s dissent unique.  What Kagan has done, perhaps without full intention, is acknowledge in a published opinion that the Supreme Court may not live up to its ideal as a neutral arbiter—and may, in contrast, be a fundamentally undemocratic institution that sits on the side of elite power. Possibly in those aforementioned dustbins, this has been said before—but never in our era with such a high-profile case. 

Justice John Roberts drafted the majority opinion, joined by Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.  Six despot elites (Roberts—Harvard Law; Thomas—Yale Law; Alito—Yale Law; Gorsuch—Harvard Law; Kavanaugh—Yale Law; Barret—Notre Dame Law) were able to strike down a policy favored by Congress and the Executive Branch which alleviated some of the financial woes of nearly 40 million people.  Justice Kagan no doubt recognized the irony of a political body which routinely gives flowers to the idea of American Democracy despite being itself the functioning antithesis.  As the dissent reads, even though the Court “is, by design, as detached as possible from the body politic,” it decided as final verdict “that some 40 million Americans will not receive the benefits the plan provides, because (so says the Court) that assistance is too ‘significan[t].’” Justice Kagan noted the Supreme Court was selecting itself as “the arbiter—indeed, the maker—of national policy” and in doing so has become "a danger to a democratic order." 

It is undisputable that there is no democratic restraint on the Court (in fact, twice now a president who faced impeachment proceedings [first Nixon, then Trump] has appointed at least three individuals)—to call it a body of autocrats is not unreasonable. As Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor wrote in her New Yorker piece, The Case for Ending the Supreme Court as We Know It, the Court is “the branch of government that is least accountable to the American public” and “has tended, for most of its history, toward a fundamental conservatism, siding with tradition over more expansive visions of human rights.”  In that article, Taylor summarized a history of biased and contradictory opinions that shifted with the tides of political power and pressure—and affirmed that “calling into question the fundamentally undemocratic nature of the court” was a necessary act should we wish “to secure our rights and liberties in the United States.”  Calls to abolish the Supreme Court were not common when Taylor raised the possibility in 2020.  And yet, less than three years later, the same concerns which justified that consideration have now been voiced from within the chambers of the Supreme Court itself.  And while Kagan isn’t likely to soon join the masses in calling for the abolition of the Court, what her dissent stands for worried Justice Roberts enough for him to end his majority opinion by calling out the “disturbing feature” of questioning “the proper role of the judiciary.” Causing misperception, Roberts claimed, “would be harmful to this institution and our country.”

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But what Roberts calls misperception is anything but.  It is seeing through the ideological construction of the Supreme Court as a removed and objective overseer, and—with candor—recognizing it for what it is:  a political body that has the ability to curtail any progressive, egalitarian-oriented thrust for the benefit of its own Class.  What the Court’s right-wing majority doesn’t want is the Public seeing the Supreme Court as an appendage to Capital and the U.S. State; and as an obstacle in our struggle for a more equitable, peaceful, and climate-stable world. They call this conclusion a misperception, and while we don’t need Kagan to tell us that we are right to think otherwise, it is striking that she did.

Aside from voiding the possibility of immediate and much needed financial relief, the most concerning thing about Biden v. Nebraska is how it continues to lay the groundwork for the Court’s ability to usurp any significant action that may be introduced to alleviate suffering as we inevitably enter new eras of economic (and environmental) crisis. The Court has now, for a third time in recent terms, invoked the ‘major questions’ doctrine to prevent forms of structural relief/industry regulation (see alsoWest Virginia v. EPA [preventing regulation of carbon emissions related to climate change]; Alabama Assn. of Realtors v. DHH [invalidating the CDC’s eviction moratorium]). What this chain of decisions indicates is that even the hard work of mobilizing to pressure politicians to act won’t be enough to secure grassroots victories. While this may be daunting to admit, it is not surprising nor is our situation unique in history. For instance, as Karl Marx wrote in his 1871 text, The Civil War in France, the Paris Commune also identified the need for judicial functionaries to be “divested” of their “sham independence” and called for judges—like other public servants—“to be elective, responsible, and revocable.” This may be a path forward to gain democratic control over the judiciary in our own extreme times.  But to be in a position to design a judicial system that works as a vehicle for our side of the struggle, we must first abolish the one that currently exists.  In sum, it all begins with the notion that Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor left us with in 2020: “It is long overdue to end the Court’s undemocratic role in U.S. society”—Now we can quote Kagan to prove it.

Pavlovian Socialism: How Metrics of Empire Can Ruin the Left

By Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso

It has been roughly a year since Ketanji Brown Jackson was sworn in to replace Stephen Breyer and become the 116th Justice of the US Supreme Court. The appointment has been hailed by liberal figureheads far and wide since then. President Joe Biden called the nomination an act of “[preserving] freedom and liberty here in the United States of America.” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer celebrated the appointment as a “greater moment for America as we rise to a more perfect union.” In reality, the affair speaks to a vital yet often ignored aspect of sociopolitical oppression in the United States: metrics of empire. 

In the United States, like in any imperialist force, the powers-that-be employ many different tactics to preserve their rule. These tactics include Pentagon involvement in Hollywood filmmaking, the deliberate whitewashing of grade-school education, and the skewing of news coverage to manufacture consent for pro-elite policies. Metrics of empire fall under this same category, as they refer to a carefully curated incentive structure by which accomplishments and developments in American society are measured and rewarded. 

The structure itself can be further broken down into three subcategories: Government, Private and Public. The Government subcategory consists of exactly what its name suggests: governmental forms of legitimation and recognition. American society has been made to believe that prominent government positions carry an inherent degree of legitimacy and sophistication, such that they should be admired and revered simply for existing, rather than routinely interrogated as hotbeds of imperialist empowerment and corruption. Such positions — due to their aforementioned societal rank — thus become rewards in and of themselves, serving as markers of achievement that deserve public reverence and praise regardless of their occupants’ work or character. Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination exemplifies this perfectly.

As a black woman working within the American legal system, Jackson experienced no shortage of hardships and systemic obstacles in her professional journey. Considering demographic data alone, it is clear that Jackson was in largely uncharted territory, as just under 5% of first-year law students are black women while they make up just over 3% of associates and less than 1% of partners. In the end, however, what was her reward for surpassing these systemic hurdles and beating overwhelming odds? A seat on the Supreme Court, a grossly antiquated, inherently undemocratic, and historically oppressive institution that most often operates at the behest of capital and bends to the will of America’s most reactionary impulses.

The Private category consists of entities such as private universities and privately owned publications:

1.  Universities (ex: The University of Chicago): The school is considered one of the 10 best in the country and has historically boasted competitive rankings across a broad range of subject areas and specializations. Yet, it was the so-called “Chicago Boys” — a group of economics graduates — who cultivated and ultimately spearheaded the implementation of neoliberal economic policy abroad, namely in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. This cohort of Chicago alumni collaborated with the United States government to advance business interests by using Augusto Pinochet’s Chile as a testing ground for the economic models and policies they hoped to pursue domestically. 

2.  Publications (ex: The New York Times): Despite being heralded as the gold standard for journalism nationwide, the investor-owned New York Times routinely employs biased coverage and partisan language when discussing matters relevant to American foreign policy -- including Israel’s ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the Iraq War — whitewashing such atrocities to manufacture consent for the imperial project.  

The Public category consists of entities such as nonprofit organizations and public-facing awards:

1.  Nonprofits (ex: Doctors Without Borders): Though it is ranked 26th among America’s Top 100 Charities according to Forbes magazine, this organization is a hotbed of white saviorism and intraorganizational racism that perpetuates US hegemony abroad through the lens of healthcare and medical treatment. 

2.  Awards (ex: The Nobel Prize): The prize is widely considered to be the most prestigious recognition of achievement in the world. Yet, the awardees of the Peace Prize have included the likes of Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama. 

This state of affairs spells a particularly grim prognosis for the socialist movement across the United States. Metrics of empire have the very real potential to serve as direct inhibitors to tangible progress in the fundamentally socialist areas of social justice, economic transformation, and material improvement. As such, a sort of Pavlovian socialism can develop, one in which it is only through the awarding of such imperial accolades and symbols of legitimation that our work is perceived as successful, casting out all other achievements in the process.

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At best, this dynamic can create a qualitative hierarchy in which the work recognized by metrics of empire is considered superior. At worst, the dynamic can become a hegemonic enclosure fundamentally opposed to the radical dimensions of socialist praxis, eventually creating a scenario in which the metrics themselves become the sought-after achievements rather than the empirical progress made by the work that warranted the metrics’ awarding in the first place. 

We’ve seen this play out already with organizations across the country, one such organization being the Sunrise Movement. While its founding principles contained more radical conceptions of action and changemaking — including sit-ins at government offices, Wide Awake demonstrations, and recognition by prominent leftist figures such as Noam Chomsky — Sunrise’s more recent activism has left much to be desired. Since the beginning of this decade, it has largely shifted away from direct action-based initiatives to focus on electoral endorsements and armchair advocacy. Most notably, these shifts have resulted in a severe lack of climate victories on the legislative front as well as serious organizational neglect of representation and empowerment of marginalized voices in the movement, particularly those of color.

The shift can be largely understood as a pragmatic change resulting from an outstanding reliance on big-money donations as well as ties to government officials and politicians. Through accepting and actively engaging with metrics of empire in this context, namely of the governmental and private varieties, the Sunrise Movement and organizations like it have provided a glimpse of what such a dynamic could mean for the socialist movement when applied to actual revolutionary praxis in the future.

This is not to suggest that socialist praxis should be entirely devoid of notable awards or recognitions. After all, acknowledgements of outstanding achievement can be an incredibly valuable way of qualifying motivated, focused, and effective work. These “metrics of the proletariat,” however, must have a carefully curated relationship to the doers of the work and to the empirical effects of it. The metrics themselves must never come to occupy the place of the work’s initial objective: substantive and revolutionary change. 

As such, “metrics of the proletariat” are a thing of the socialist future, an element of our aspirational imaginary that can come to occupy the dynamics of our work down the line, but not that of the present day. So long as systemic injustices and widespread oppression reign supreme — further emboldened by the unrelenting fervor of imperial capitalism — these metrics will inevitably reward advantaged and privileged socialists and, more pressingly, will run the risk of becoming metrics of empire in and of themselves.  

Thus, as the socialist movement carries on with its vital work of national and global changemaking, it cannot neglect the very real hurdle that metrics of empire can come to represent. Only by preemptively abolishing the air of legitimacy these metrics now hold — and looking toward a future in which new metrics of success and achievement that honor socialist ideals and avoid imperial capitalist corruption will be established — can the movement avoid existing structures of incentive and recognition that seek to counteract its aims at every turn.

Juan Gonzalez Valdivieso is a Colombian Marxist. In his writing, he seeks to interrogate the nuances of socialist thought and praxis.

The Political Tragedy of Capitalist Rule

By Harry Magdoff and Paul M. Sweezy

Republished from Monthly Review.

Toward the end of his life, Engels wrote: “It is a peculiarity of the bourgeoisie, distinguishing it from all other ruling classes, that there is a turning point in its development after which every increase in its means of power, that is in the first place every increase in its capital, only tends to make it more and more incapable of ruling politically.” Whatever may have been the validity of this statement a hundred years ago (Engels died in 1895), there can be no doubt that it applies with uncanny accuracy to the world of the late twentieth century.

Society is made up of parts that work together, sometimes more and sometimes less successfully, to produce its livelihood and reproduce itself. The master insight of Marxism is that during that period of human history that has been recorded (some four millennia) the decisive parts have been classes, one dominant and exploitative, the other dominated and productive. For most of this period both parts have been necessary: the brains above, the brawn below. They have also been in continuous conflict over the division of their joint product. The vision of Marxism has been that with increases in human knowledge and growth in the productivity of human labor, the necessity for this split tends to disappear. Brains and brawn tend to come together in the far more numerous productive class. From being a struggle over the division of a joint product, the conflict between the classes becomes increasingly concerned about what will be produced and for what ends. Making these decisions is surely what Engels had in mind when he spoke of “ruling politically.”

Successful political rule in a class society is far from being guaranteed. It involves on the part of the ruling class not only effective protection for its own power but also an understanding of the design of the system as a whole and action to see that the essential parts are maintained in working order and able to perform their respective functions. If a ruling class acquires a monopoly of power and used it exclusively for its own advantage, the result will be certain disaster. The historical record is replete with such tragedies. What is required for successful political rule, therefore, is either wisdom and self-restraint or counter-pressure from a non-ruling but powerful class or alliance of classes. Whatever may have been true of earlier times, it is pretty clear that no modern capitalist ruling class has ever been blessed with wisdom or self-restraint, from which it follows that such successes as may have been achieved in the way of political rule are the result of effective counter-pressure from other classes.

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Many examples, we believe, could be cited in support of this conclusion. One of the best and probably the most famous is the story as told by Marx in Volume 1 of Capital of how bourgeois governments in England, protesting and screaming all the way, finally came during a centuries-long struggle to accept the necessity of a comprehensive regime of labor legislation (prohibition of child labor, conditions of work, length of the working day, etc.). Similar stories could be, indeed have been, told about most of the other developed capitalist countries, including the United States. As for the underdeveloped capitalist countries of the world, most of them, sadly, have little or nothing in the way of successful political rule to boast of.

What has all of this, you may ask, to do with our opening quotation from Engels? His contention, you will recall, was that there is a point in the development of capitalist power after which its capacity for political rule declines. Our contention is that history has proved him absolutely right.

The last two decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the amount and power of capital on a global scale. Common sense tells us that capital has never been in a better position to rule politically, i.e., to do the things that need to be done for society to function reasonably effectively and with a minimum of destructive conflict and disturbance. In reality, of course, nothing of this kind has happened. Instead, capital has used its power exclusively in its own interest, and in doing so has set the world on the road to the disaster history should have taught us to expect.

What should we learn from this experience? First and foremost, that as the second millennium and the twentieth century draw to a close, capital has totally lost its capacity for political rule. Now more than ever what is needed is organized, militant struggle to check and reverse capital’s onslaught on the earning power and living standards of the world’s working and oppressed classes and on the natural environment that is the indispensable foundation for civilized life on an already endangered planet. And the final lesson surely is that success in this struggle must eventually lead to the definitive overthrow of the rule of capital.

The Rosenbergs: Traitors or Heroes?

By Stephen Millies

Republished from Struggle La Lucha.

In his funeral eulogy for Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, W.E.B. Du Bois declared, “They died because they would not lie.” The Rosenbergs were burned to death in the electric chair by the U.S. government on Juneteenth 1953.

Du Bois, the legendary Black scholar, also arranged the adoption of the Rosenbergs’ two young children, Michael and Robert. The Jewish orphans were adopted by Anne Meeropol and Abel Meeropol. Abel wrote “Strange Fruit,” a song about lynching that Billie Holiday made famous. 

The Rosenbergs were blamed for the Soviet Union being able to develop an atomic bomb. Their frame-up and execution for espionage during the Korean War was the peak of the anti-communist witch hunt in the United States. 

The ruling class was in a frenzy because of the Chinese Revolution. The Soviet Union’s ability to defend itself against the Pentagon’s nukes made the banksters even more mad.

The FBI and corporate media insisted the Soviets “stole the secret” of the atom bomb. The real secret was revealed when the U.S. dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. By incinerating 100,000 people, including 30,000 Korean slave laborers, the Pentagon showed it was possible to develop nuclear weapons.

Showing it was what made it knowable. Some of the scientists involved in the Manhattan Project — the code name for the U.S. atom bomb project — gave the Soviets five years to match the U.S. effort. 

The rub wouldn’t be in the theoretical work. U.S. scientists knew the Soviet Union had capable physicists.

Among them was Lev Landau, who would win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1962. Even before the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev had devised the periodic table of the elements.

U.S. scientists thought the Soviets would have difficulty in making extremely pure chemicals and seals to lock in corrosive gases. Because of socialist economic planning, the Soviet Union was able to concentrate its efforts and explode a nuclear device on Aug. 29, 1949. It took four years, not five, to produce.

Decades of lies

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover immediately set out to nab the “communist spies” that smuggled secrets. How else could those “stupid people” in the Soviet Union have produced nuclear weapons? 

U.S. schoolchildren were taught their country was the land of great inventors like Thomas Edison. Newspapers told their readers that only the U.S. could have built the bomb.

Thirty years later, President Ronald Reagan said there wasn’t a Russian word for freedom. (There is. It’s svoboda.) 

So U.S. capitalists were astonished when the Soviet Union sent the first artificial satellite into space on Nov. 7, 1957 — the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

Claims that the Sputnik satellite was the result of spying fell flat. The Pentagon wasn’t able to launch its own satellite until months later, on Jan. 31, 1958.

It would have been much more difficult to execute the Rosenbergs after Sputnik. It shattered the bigoted conception that 150 different nationalities in the Soviet Union couldn’t do science.

Today another big lie is being told. The People’s Republic of China is being blamed for the COVID-19 pandemic.

With no evidence, the media and even comedians like Jon Stewart are claiming the coronavirus “leaked” from a Wuhan laboratory. This is a blood libel similar to blaming Jewish people for plagues in medieval Europe or the racist myth that immigrants bring diseases to the U.S.

Building a frame-up

The FBI framed the Rosenbergs and a co-defendant, Morton Sobell, by connecting dots and forging evidence. At the end of World War II, the Communist Party in the United States had around 75,000 members, according to the University of Washington’s “Mapping Social Movements” project, including thousands of Black members. They fought racism and built unions.  

Over 10,000 party members were members of the U.S. armed forces. Some party members had government jobs, including the electrical engineer Julius Rosenberg, who was employed at Fort Monmouth army base in New Jersey.

The Manhattan Project had 130,000 employees. U.S. army counterintelligence agents constantly spied on them. 

Even J. Robert Oppenheimer, considered to be the father of the atomic bomb, was a suspect. The army hesitated appointing Oppenheimer to lead the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos laboratory because of his left-wing associations before the war.

Yet with thousands of U.S. Army and FBI agents prowling around, nobody claimed to have found any spy rings until after the Soviets exploded their bomb.

Julius Rosenberg was fired from his civilian job with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in January 1945 as a suspected communist. (He actually resigned his membership in 1942.) But Julius wasn’t arrested until July 1950.

At the time there were still around 40,000 Communist Party members. Hundreds of thousands of people had worked with the CP or the Young Communist League.

That was a big talent pool for Hoover and his FBI agents to construct a frame-up by matching people with left-wing backgrounds. They found out that Julius Rosenberg’s brother-in-law David Greenglass, an ex-YCL member, had worked as a machinist at Los Alamos. 

Presto! The “Rosenberg spy ring” was invented.

Under threat of the death penalty, David Greenglass told prosecutors whatever they wanted. His lying testimony sent his sister Ethel Rosenberg to the electric chair. It took five jolts of electricity to kill her.

Show trial

The Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell were convicted in a show trial. Although at the time a quarter of New York City’s population was Jewish, not a single Jewish juror was chosen.

One of the federal prosecutors was Roy Cohn, who had illegal “ex parte” conversations with presiding Judge Irving Kaufman in which Cohn urged the death penalty. After serving as Senator Joe McCarthy’s sidekick, Cohn became a lawyer and mentor for Donald Trump.

The evidence was flimsy. David Greenglass produced three crude sketches. One looked like a pie chart. A baby carriage couldn’t have been made from them, much less an atomic bomb.

Greenglass said his spy contact was Harry Gold, a chemist and pathological liar who admitted that he “lied for a period of 16 years.” Gold also claimed to be a courier for Klaus Fuchs, a scientist at Los Alamos.

Fuchs confessed he was a spy to a Scotland Yard detective and was jailed in Britain. Fuchs identified Gold as his contact from a picture.  

Fuchs’ statement and identification of Gold is questionable. Fuchs never confronted Gold in a U.S. court and thus couldn’t be cross-examined. It’s striking that the convictions of Greenglass, Gold and Fuchs would have been impossible without their confessions.

The FBI even suspected future Nobel Prize winner Richard Feynman, who had been Fuchs’ roommate at Los Alamos. FBI agents changed their mind only because Feynman was completely non-political.

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Morton Sobell was indicted because he was a schoolmate of Julius Rosenberg at New York’s City College and a former YCL member. The only witness against Sobell was Max Elitcher, who claimed vaguely to have seen Sobell visit Julius Rosenberg while carrying a container that could have had film in it. 

He then said he had no idea what was in the container, yet Sobell was sentenced to 30 years in prison.  He served 17, including five years at Alcatraz.

The prosecution stressed that Sobell and his family went to Mexico after David Greenglass was arrested. If Sobell was such a master spy, wouldn’t the Soviets have tried to help him escape?

Instead Mexican secret police kidnapped Sobell and turned him over to FBI agents at the border.

A key piece of evidence was forged. A hotel card from the Albuquerque Hilton was introduced to prove Harry Gold was in town to meet David Greenglass on June 3, 1945.

Miriam and Walter Schneir were authors of “Invitation to an Inquest,” a detailed exposé of the Rosnberg-Sobell case. They looked at copies of the card. It had different date stamps on the front and back despite Gold having checked in and out on the same day. 

When the Schneirs sought to examine the original card, the FBI told them that the evidence was destroyed, even though J. Edgar Hoover called the Rosenberg case “the crime of the century.”

Smearing the dead

Millions of people around the world rallied around the Rosenbergs. They saw parallels between their frame-up and the anti-Jewish persecution of French army officer Alfred Dreyfus decades before.

The American Jewish Committee, which represents the small section of the Jewish Community that’s capitalist, didn’t think so. Writing in the AJC’s Commentary magazine, historian Lucy Dawidowicz endorsed the Rosenbergs’ execution. 

Today when Jewish youth join marches supporting Palestinian liberation, Commentary magazine supports bombing and starving Gaza.

The publication of “Invitation to an Inquest” in 1965 sparked new interest in the Rosenberg and Sobell cases. The U.S. deep state counterattacked, particularly after the overthrow of the Soviet Union.

The FBI and CIA say they have proof that the Rosenbergs and Sobell were guilty. They point to the “Venona Project,” which consists of allegedly deciphered messages between Soviet agents in the U.S. and their Moscow headquarters. The documents claim to show that the Rosenbergs, Sobell and dozens of other people in the U.S. were Soviet agents.

Why should anybody believe U.S. spy agencies? These are the folks that told the world that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Even if the Venona papers are genuine, the rub is matching code names with individuals.  One of the alleged code names for Julius Rosenberg was “liberal.” Does that sound like a name for an accused communist super-spy? 

The code name linked to Morton Sobell described him as having a wooden leg, which he didn’t have. There was no code name for Ethel Rosenberg.

The Venona Project smeared a series of liberals who couldn’t defend themselves since they were dead. That was the case of the economist Harry Dexter White, who worked in the U.S. Treasury Department.

The deep state and the ultra-right use the Venona papers to support Joe McCarthy’s phony charge that President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration was filled with communists.

The documents have also been used to rehabilitate Elizabeth Bentley’s tarnished reputation. The professional liar gave dishonest testimony against the Rosenbergs, defendants in other trials and before a series of congressional witch-hunting committees.

Typical of the so-called “red spy queen” was her claim to have given the secret date of the Normandy landings to the Soviets. Actually, Gen. Dwight Eisenhower informed the Soviets of when D-Day would occur. He did so because he wanted them to launch an offensive and prevent German troops from being withdrawn from the Eastern Front.

Never forget the Rosenbergs

“I consider your crime worse than murder,” declared Judge Kaufman when he sentenced the Rosenbergs to the electric chair  

Worse than the killers of the 14-year-old Emmett Till? The two racists who tortured the Black youth to death got off scot-free. 

Gen. Douglas MacArthur wanted to drop dozens of atom bombs on Korea and China. Judge Kaufman blamed the Rosenbergs for the U.S. not being able to do so.

Former Secretary of State Dean Rusk wrote in his memoirs that the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs wanted President John F. Kennedy to approve a plan to launch nuclear first strikes against the socialist countries.

The whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg revealed that the Pentagon plan would have killed 600 million people. 

What if the Rosenbergs and Morton Sobell had helped the Soviets build an atom bomb? It was only because the Soviet Union — and later the People’s Republic of China and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea — were able to develop a deterrent to the Pentagon’s arsenal of atomic and hydrogen bombs that a nuclear holocaust was averted. 

But the Rosenbergs and Sobell didn’t have the ability to penetrate the Manhattan Project. The FBI wanted them to finger dozens of liberals to back up Joe McCarthy’s fantastic claim of “20 years of treason” under the Roosevelt and Truman administrations. 

The courage of Ethel Rosenberg, Julius Rosenberg and Morton Sobell prevented this nightmare.

Ethel Rosenberg was electrocuted for supposedly typing reports. She was arrested almost a month after Julius Rosenberg was jailed to put pressure on him to lie.

David Greenglass later admitted he lied about Ethel Rosenberg’s typing. Justice demands that Ethel Rosenberg be given a presidential pardon.

When Morton Sobell was 91 years old, he was badgered by New York Times reporter Sam Harris into saying he and Julius Rosenberg offered information to the Soviets. It was from their jobs as electrical engineers, not from the Manhattan Project.

Twenty-seven million Soviet people died defeating Hitler. Yet during World War II both Britain and the United States refused to share new anti-aircraft weapons and radar with the Soviets.

If Morton Sobell and Julius Rosenberg did indeed help the Soviets, it wasn’t espionage to help a gallant ally. It was whistleblowing, like Daniel Ellsberg did when he released the Pentagon Papers or the truth-telling by Chelsea Manning about U.S. war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The best way to honor the Rosenbergs is to fight even harder to free Mumia Abu-Jamal, Leonard Peltier, Ruchell Cinque Magee, Sundiata Acoli, Mutulu Shakur and dozens of other political prisoners.

One way to do so is to donate to the Rosenberg Fund for Children, which helps the children of political prisoners, at RFC.org.

Red Scared: Revising History at the Victims of Communism Museum

By Billie Anania

Republished from The Baffler.

“THERE IS NO WAY he is a victim of communism,” my partner quips, pointing to a photo of the late Pope John Paul II. We are near the end of our visit to the new Victims of Communism Museum, standing in an elevator-size lobby with photographs of “victims” screen-printed all over the walls. Among the many victims and honorees: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, the Dalai Lama, Romanian writer Herta Müller, Hong Kong activist Joshua Wong, and Hungarian neofascist Viktor Orbán.

These public figures are the latest faces of a long campaign to flip the historical script. Ai Weiwei, among the highest-selling artists in the world, has earned his keep resolutely opposing the Chinese Communist Party. Meanwhile, Orbán’s vocal denunciations of Soviet occupation helped launch a political career filled with what critics call “pure Nazi speech.” Despite the cognitive dissonance of this display—Müller’s father served in the Waffen-SS, for god’s sake—the strategy allows the decades-old Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation to position all anti-communists as renegade freedom fighters regardless of their fascist associations, thus rebranding its Holocaust revisionism anew. What better destination for their new museum than Washington, D.C., just one mile away from the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum?

Originally founded during the Clinton era by a unanimous act of Congress, the Victims of Communism Foundation is a relic of Cold War-era propaganda. Its central belief that communism has claimed “more than 100 million” victims was lifted from The Black Book of Communism, a controversial piece of Western agitprop that has since been delegitimized by its own contributors. The book, as well as the foundation, peddle the spurious notion that a “double genocide” took place in the twentieth century: one by fascists and another by so-called “Judeo-Bolshevik Communists.”

According to the Victims of Communism team, all Nazis killed by Soviets are victims of communism, as are all deaths resulting from Covid-19. Inside the museum, Mao Zedong figures as a “mass murderer,” but Adolf Hitler is nowhere to be found. Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, too, are portrayed as running authoritarian, anti-democratic regimes, yet British colonialism and American imperialism garner nary a mention. Hardly anywhere in the foundation’s documents, or in the museum, are Nazis, fascists, royals, colonizers, or capitalists portrayed as aggressors. In fact, World War II isn’t even included in the museum’s timeline.

Is now a good time to mention that the Victims of Communism Foundation’s original co-chairman, Yaroslav Stetsko, once led the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to ally with Nazi Germany alongside Stepan Bandera, who is now a national hero of Ukraine? Not only does the foundation count Nazi sympathizers among its scant few donors, but many other immortalized “victims” were involved in the deportation and extermination of Jews, Poles, Roma, Serbs, Belarusians, and Ukrainians on behalf of Nazi puppet regimes across Europe. I went into the museum expecting to see the usual suspects among the victims—from Holocaust perpetrators Ante Pavelić and Roman Shukhevych to the kulaks and Cuban plantation owners—but was surprised to find the vaunted list has gotten a facelift. Perhaps they hope to attract a new generation of culture warriors, or just far-right trolls with Turning Point USA aspirations.

After more than an hour wandering around the building, I was left deeply unsure what, in their view, even constitutes a “victim” of communism, let alone a “communist.” No one will walk out of this institution knowing much more than some fudged numbers and fashy buzzwords. This kind of hyperbolic revisionism meets roadside tourist trap is capitalist projection at its finest, an alternative history built by dark money and reinforced by disinformation. Nonetheless, considering how much the art world masks its own regressive politics, an unabashed right-wing exhibition of this magnitude is a genuine treat for sickos like me.

Part fascist propaganda, part Epcot ride, the Victims of Communism “museum” is actually just three claustrophobic rooms of dystopian imagery and haunted house sounds, all designed to shock and appall. Tickers run at the bottom of screens endlessly tallying “victims,” while jump-cut documentary footage rushes between shots of Cuba, China, Poland, and Hungary. Along the floors and walls, the words WAR, REVOLUTION, and TERROR pop out against deep shades of black and crimson. LIES, one placard announces near an illuminated image of Eastern European Christians holding crosses. RELIGIOUS OPPRESSION, reads another, juxtaposed with stock imagery of barbed wire.

I can only describe the videos in this place as Ken Burns documentaries from hell. The first begins once visitors trigger a foot plate, enhancing the venue’s dungeon-esque quality. Then a series of jagged screens light up, interspersing photographs of Lenin, Trotsky, and Tsar Nicholas with an ominous, staccato orchestral score. Rather than address the complex historical conditions leading up to the October Revolution, our humble narrator goes straight for the gold: “Reformers hoped for a democratic solution—the Bolsheviks had another idea.”

It was hard for me not to burst out laughing at this appeal to Menshevik supremacy, but I held my cool, lest I offend the solitary front desk worker—who was, I should add, the only other person in the building. Afterward, I noticed a small glass display that held a first edition of The Communist Manifesto, as well as a Russian newspaper from the day after the Bolsheviks took power. “Marx and Engels’ manifesto gave birth to the world’s most violent regimes,” the nearby text intones. Lenin, too, is accused of single-handedly building the gulags and killing “hundreds of thousands” of Russians, leaving a “blood-soaked legacy” upon his death a few years later. Based on this room alone, one might surmise that communism is an individualistic, tyrannical ideology oriented around exploitation.

Of course, they would be wrong, but no matter to our humble curators; the museum never sets out to define communism in any capacity. In their selective version of history, once upon a time, Marx and Engels wrote an evil little pamphlet, and then—skipping right over the Paris Commune—we find ourselves in 1917 at the start of the Russian Revolution. We then jump, curiously, from Stalin consolidating power in the 1930s to the Cold War and beyond. These glaring gaps in history feel intentional in the displays devoted to starvation and imprisonment, in which Soviet gulags take precedence, but Nazi concentration camps are nowhere to be found.

A related video juxtaposes the gulags with prisons in Vietnam, China, Korea, and Cuba. Paintings and sketches made by detainees are interwoven with quotes from Nobel laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (a favorite of Steve Bannon and Jordan Peterson). Hearing the words of prisoners and experiencing their art, I was somewhat moved by the concept of creative resilience in confinement, particularly given the brilliant work produced by incarcerated artists here in the States. But it’s hard not to see this as artwashing Nazi war crimes, or what Ljiljana Radonić calls “comparative trivialization.”

By downplaying the Holocaust, the museum can seamlessly move to the Holodomor and Great Leap Forward, two periods of enforced economic reform that they portray as intentional massacres. And with little wall space remaining, they do a speed-run through Vietnam, China, North Korea, and Cambodia, sloppily tying together Juche, the state ideology of North Korea, with the Khmer Rouge. This rhetorical trick, which is hard not to perceive as racist, allows them to gloss over the nuances inherent to these distinct regions while avoiding what happened in Cambodia before Pol Pot took power. (As Anthony Bourdain once said, if you visit Cambodia, you will “never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands.”) In a final video, the narrator also claims that Czech protesters from 1968 desired, above all, “democracy and free markets,” rather than the loosening of Soviet control over creative and political forms of expression. As it ended, my gaze fell on a nearby wall photograph showing an East German guard fleeing to West Berlin, which is credited to the CIA.

Toward the exit, an interactive choose-your-own-adventure game allows visitors to reflect on all this “information” as a Cuban, Korean, or German individual. Two paths can be chosen on the screens provided: in the first, you comply with a newly appointed communist government, while the other takes you on the dissident path. No matter which path I chose, however, my protagonist ended up compromised—either by facing persecution or bringing shame on my legacy. The framing is utterly nihilistic, a downward spiral resulting in entrapment no matter the response. In many ways, it resembles how people describe getting arrested in the United States.

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Before going any further, I should clarify a few things. I don’t doubt the existence of persecution and suffering in communist countries. I’m well aware of the mortal consequences of agrarian reforms in China and Russia, as well as the problems of absolute power. But the Victims of Communism Museum is not the place to find valid critique; it’s a wasteland of thinly veiled bigotry. Their fast-and-loose analysis feeds into a far-right strategy to whitewash imperial, feudal, and fascist histories, developed at a time when Western countries welcomed former Nazis into top-brass positions. Moreover, selectively lifting stats from long-debunked sources only further promotes disinformation; for an example, look no further than the “horrors of socialism” resolution recently passed in the House, which parrots the “100 million victims” statistic.

Undercutting all of this, of course, is the role that Western powers have played in constraining—violently and otherwise—Soviet and Third-World autonomy. Not a single revolution of the twentieth century went without its fair share of trade sanctions, assassination attempts, and disinformation campaigns. Rather than focusing on building a new society, revolutionary movements have always been forced on the defensive—and even still, freedom of art flourished in the well-funded Soviet film industry, and Vietnam successfully ousted its occupiers. Should we really be taking what Holocaust revisionists claim about China, Cuba, and elsewhere today at face value?

Conflating communism with fascism—while conveniently eliding the horrors carried out by its own fascist honorees—is old hat for this foundation, and the museum treads well-worn territory. Curiously, many of the foremost “victims” are men, and few are Black. I almost have to admire their attempts to tiptoe around slavery and identity politics, if it weren’t for the number of Black radicals persecuted by and within capitalist countries—from the outright assassinations of Amílcar Cabral and Patrice Lumumba to the persecution of intellectuals like Assata Shakur and Paul Robeson. Of course, even the nightmare fantasies concocted here include a tinge of casual racism, and it’s remarkable they even thought to acknowledge communist revolutions in Africa (albeit in small text near the exit).

As this all makes clear, the museum is not really for anyone who disagrees with conservative doctrine, or even for centrists playing both sides; it’s for far-right ideologues who already champion the views espoused here and would like their children to do the same. As with most roadside attractions, every reactionary impulse is thrown to the wall to see what sticks. While Covid-19 is simultaneously a hoax and communist plot, you can still find the Victims of Communism-branded hand sanitizer in its gift shop, along with supposedly real fragments of the Berlin Wall, anti-Che Guevara shirts, bracelets made by a Ukrainian jeweler, and—oh my—a Nora D. Clinton book on the perils of quarantining. Communists are simultaneously to blame for Covid-19, as well as for lockdowns, but please do remember to wash your hands!

By now you’ve likely seen the videos of the expansive encampment across from the museum in D.C.’s McPherson Square. Social media posts hardly convey the scale; there are countless tents across multiple city blocks keeping the city’s unhoused population warm through the winter months. “When you step outside the building you conveniently enter the real-time updating Victims of Capitalism Museum,” one astute reviewer noted. While D.C. officials recently cleared the premises—an action endorsed by the entire Washington Post editorial board—I doubt they recognize the irony here.

This is the world the Victims of Communism Foundation seeks to preserve, and the one they also tend to blame on their liberal opponents—who are also, supposedly, all communists. Coincidentally, the museum is located in the United Mine Workers of America Building where, as Mike Davis has written, union leader John L. Lewis notoriously banned communists and imposed top-down leadership to limit local autonomy. Much like Lewis, the museum’s goal is to obfuscate, yet for anyone with a working smartphone, much of it can easily be written off. At the same time, Eastern European countries like Hungary, Lithuania, and Latvia have all passed laws criminalizing opposition to the “double genocide” claims, so maybe the propaganda really is working.

For now, the Victims of Communism Museum continues its mission uninterrupted—or at least from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m., five days a week—all while its foundation still receives donations from fascist sympathizers across Eastern Europe and the Balkans. As recently as 2021, they installed a controversial memorial in Ottawa entirely with private funding. Rather than name victims on the memorial, the foundation instead listed the monument’s moneyed donors. Perhaps letting people Google victim names might get them into trouble again. At the very least, Canadian media remains skeptical.

“Terror is an absolute necessity during times of revolution,” a quote from Soviet officer Felix Dzerzhinsky reads on one wall back in the museum. True enough, but terror for whom? For the profiteers of state terror at home and abroad? Or enslavers of the prison-industrial complex who sit on museum boards? I fail to see what Mao or Stalin could do beyond the grave to significantly impact my life, but I can see how white nationalism threatens my agency. I can see that by flipping the script, fascists quickly transform into freedom fighters, and thus the severity of slavery and extrajudicial killing in capitalist countries become mere matters of opinion. Such sore winners will never be happy until every last speck of land is open for extraction—and even then, it still won’t be enough.

But, hey, don’t just take my word for it! Listen to the voices of their workers—or, if you will, the Victims of the Victims of Communism Foundation. One woman who worked there for a few months notes that “sexist and conservative management” contributed to a “toxic work environment.” Another employee claims that anyone who is not a “staunch conservative” will be “extremely uncomfortable” with management’s daily discussions and that employees are not allowed to “openly voice concerns.” While none of this sounds surprising for a U.S. nonprofit, it does speak volumes about an institution that claims to be on the right side of authoritarianism—turns out they’re just on the right.

What the Titan Submersible Says About Capitalist Culture

By Saheim Patrick

It is ironic that the name of the doomed sub that captivated the minds of Americans this past week, contains the suffix: -gate, a morpheme that has become de facto synonymous with conspiracy theories. The irony stems from the fact that conspiracy theories, or at least the ones that attach -gate to their title, are a direct product of the type of distracting, unified discourse characteristic of our current, US society that has allowed the topic of the OceanGate submersible to thrive.

The story, largely irrelevant for reasons which will be divulged, goes like this: five men aboard a twenty-two foot carbon-fiber and titanium craft, named the Titan, planning to tour the ruins of the famed Titanic shipwreck. At an hour and forty-five minutes into their expedition, contact was lost with their surface ship: the Polar Prince. In the days following, the story and question of whether they were alive or not, left the public reeling, and the media magnates sensationalizing. It is important, for the sake of critiquing the discourse surrounding it, to note that the men aboard paid 250,000 USD each for this trip. This particular detail has stoked a fire in the discussions of the event, namely on Twitter, and has promoted a false dichotomy, a false binary, in talking about the sub. The sides that you can take are presented as: finding the likely deaths of these men a tragic event, or ridiculing and showing apathy towards their deaths. It is not uncommon for a simplification of this sort to happen in modern discourse.

The dominant medium of communication in the US is social media. It is easy to believe it to be the Internet as a whole, but the difference between a technology and a medium must be noted (not only for this clarification, but for our understanding of modern discourse as a whole). Neil Postman’s 1985 treatise on dominant mediums of communication throughout history and television as a medium, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, tackles specifically this difference.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. Like the brain, a technology is a physical apparatus. Like the mind, a medium is a use to which a physical apparatus is put. A technology becomes a medium as it employs a particular symbolic code, as it finds its place in a particular social setting, as it insinuates itself into economic and political contexts. A technology, in other words, is merely a machine. A medium is the social and intellectual environment a machine creates.

In other words, a technology is a machine, and a medium is the use of that machine. It then becomes clear that while the Internet is a dominant technology today, the dominant medium, its dominant use, is social media. And with this in mind, it becomes abundantly clear as to why discourse today is the way it is.

There is a constant, pervasive threat of irrelevance anytime one posts on social media, and I am sure that anyone who has spent more than a few days on any given platform can attest to the rapid speed at which one buzzing topic moves to the next. As a result, arguments, ideas, and discussions are spewed out quick and without any nuance. Actual engagement with the ideas being talked out cannot be risked. In the time it takes you to study, read a book, or to genuinely think about the subject you are so fervent about, there is a new point of mass interest, and you are left speaking into a void which no longer cares to hear what you have to say.

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It is then not surprising to me that discourse on Twitter has taken such an extreme split; such a sharp turning away from the simple and foundational idea that multiple things can be true about a given thing at once. It is possible to believe that the deaths of the billionaires aboard the Titan are sad. Objectively, I think if any one of us were in that situation, ignoring of course the circumstances that got them in the situation in the first place, we would be primally and utterly terrified. That is a chilling thought. However, it is also possible to believe, at the same time, that the reaction this has caused in us is utterly terrifying. What is there to happen when people believe that they have to passionately defend billionaires’ sanctity of life? What does this mean for revolution in America?

I will put it this way: we are slaves on a plantation. Our plantation’s master has gone away on a boating trip with neighboring plantation masters. On this trip, an accident happens which leads to our master, and his master friends, dying. If you asked me, a slave, to put myself in the master’s shoes, and to divorce myself from the fact that I as a slave do not even have the resources to take a boating trip, I would surely say that would be a scary moment for me and I may feel your idea of empathy. However, my master has died, his plantation still exists, a new master will come soon to rule that plantation, and I am still a slave. Therefore, that idea of empathy that you have has its limits on me. As well, if there were a group of slaves on the plantation so intensely tore up about master’s death and scolding other slaves for not being as tore up, it would lead me to fear that when the time to fight for our liberation comes, these fellow slaves will not be able to be counted on. It brings into question whether someone is truly for the people; for if you are not staunchly for the people, you are against them.

The even more frightening factor here is that people so loudly championing empathy for the billionaires are not even aware that they are serving capitalist interests. They cannot tell that — by the way that the meticulous, scientific system of capitalism works — anytime you defend billionaires, you are defending capitalism. It is no coincidence that this story was pushed as hard as it was. Within three days of the submersible going missing, a documentary on it has already been filmed, produced, edited, and sent to air. Ask yourself, and I mean seriously ask yourself: why do we not hear the stories of the people who are ruthlessly exploited by billionaires as much as we do this? In that answer is also the answer as to why you will not hear the same people championing empathy for these billionaires, also championing empathy for their victims, whom are countless and suffering daily.

Aside from the political thought that this story may inspire, it is a synecdoche of a larger culture of irrelevant news and information that has been in place for centuries in US. What so many people fail to recognize about this story, and its parts, is that it simply does not matter.

What bearing does this have on your day-to-day life? I am not asking this to say that any story or information that is not directly related to you cannot have value, but I am saying that a lot of the information sensationalized by US media has no actual value, and for a reason.

It is the job of the capitalist system to keep the people subordinated and unconscious. If the system succeeds in doing this, people will blindly practice, uphold, and promote the interests and values of capitalism. For if the masses of people took even the most simple view of capitalism, it would become abundantly clear how unjust it is. A handful of people control and own not only the means of production, but the production, while those who work on these means of production and produce have no stake in where they work and often can’t even access what they produce. It is clear from even this base-level understanding of capitalism that it is a system built on exploitation. By extension, to keep people subordinated, unconscious, and unaware of this, they must remain uninformed; or, better yet, consumed with useless information. As Kwame Ture once put it, “the capitalist system makes the people think they’re thinking, when in fact they are not thinking.” Therefore, when the people waste our time discussing a situation which has no true effect on our lives, convinced that value can be traded for entertainment — and then, at that, discuss without a tinge of nuance, critical thinking, or rhetoric — the capitalist rejoices! This is because all while doing this, the people truly believe we are contributing to an important cultural discourse. Sure, the culture is having discourse, but what is it doing for the culture?

This irrelevant news disguised in a cloak of being relevant is not new. As Henry David Thoreau incisively remarked in 1849:

We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate .... We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.

My point is this: if you can tell me five facts about the Titan submersible, or any other nationally syndicated story, but not five about the community directly around you, you are not an informed person, you are a distracted one. And this battle of focusing and reshifting toward real issues and real change is one we must be constantly waging, because capitalism is constantly waging against that.

On the Concept of "Time Poverty"

[Photo credit: Marisa9 / iStock / Getty Images Plus]

By Rugveda Sawant

“In capitalist society spare time is acquired for one class by converting the whole life-time of the masses into labour-time.”

-Karl Marx

There is a considerable amount of literature on “time-poverty” concocted by researchers and policy-makers. The term is used to denote lack of time an individual experiences to devote to personal and social activities which ends up negatively impacting their well-being.

Apart from the already established definition of the term, a fresh deconstruction of it may lead one to observe that if poverty is understood as a lack of (financial) resources, time-poverty may be understood as a lack of (financial) resources to purchase time rather than lack of time itself. The worker who does not own any means of production and has nothing but his labour-power to sell in order to sustain himself, must do so by lending it out for a certain duration of time to the capitalist who purchases it in order to extract surplus value. However, it becomes important to note that what is being sold and purchased here is not time, but labour-power. Time is not a commodity- it can be a measure of value but has no value in itself; it cannot be produced or purchased. Defining “time-poverty” as “lack of time” helps mask this simple contradiction; we are stuck with a term that fails to delineate the exact relationship between time and poverty, leading to the proposal of flawed solutions for a legitimate issue.

Even though a more liberal understanding is that people, no matter what their financial status, can experience “time-poverty”, a more sophisticated argument observes that it is an issue more relevant to and persistent amongst the income-poor. [1] To avoid ambiguity, let us replace “poor” with the working class and “rich” with the capitalist class. The working class earns its money through ‘wages’ while the capitalist class earns it through ‘profits’. The following illustration by Engels will help us understand how ‘wages’ and ‘profits’ are earned:

“The capitalist takes the labourer into his workshop or factory, where all the articles required for the work can be found – raw materials, auxiliary materials (coal, dyestuffs, etc.), tools, and machines. Here, the worker begins to work. His daily wages are, as above, 3 shillings, and it makes no difference whether he earns them as day-wages or piece-wages. We again assume that in 12 hours the worker adds by his labour a new value of 6 shillings to the value of the raw materials consumed, which new value the capitalist realizes by the sale of the finished piece of work. Out of this new value, he pays the worker his 3 shillings, and the remaining 3 shillings he keeps for himself. If, now, the labourer creates in 12 hours a value of 6 shillings, in 6 hours he creates a value of 3 shillings. Consequently, after working 6 hours for the capitalist, the labourer has returned to him the equivalent of the 3 shillings received as wages. After 6 hours’ work, both are quits, neither one owing a penny to the other.

“Hold on there!” now cries out the capitalist. “I have hired the labourer for a whole day, for 12 hours. But 6 hours are only half-a-day. So work along lively there until the other 6 hours are at an end – only then will we be even.” And, in fact, the labourer has to submit to the conditions of the contract upon which he entered of “his own free will", and according to which he bound himself to work 12 whole hours for a product of labour which cost only 6 hours’ labour.

Similarly with piece-wages. Let us suppose that in 12 hours our worker makes 12 commodities. Each of these costs a shilling in raw materials and wear-and-tear, and is sold for 2.5 shillings. On our former assumption, the capitalist gives the labourer .25 of a shilling for each piece, which makes a total of 3 shillings for 12 pieces. To earn this, the worker requires 12 hours. The capitalist receives 30 shillings for the 12 pieces; deducting 24 shillings for raw materials and wear-and-tear, there remains 6 shillings, of which he pays 3 shillings in wages and pockets the remaining 3. Just as before! Here, also, the worker labours 6 hours for himself – i.e., to replace his wages (half-an-hour in each of the 12 hours), and 6 hours for the capitalist.” (Frederick Engels, Wage Labour and Capital, 1891)

Profits are earned by appropriating unpaid labour of the working class. Profit constitutes the amount of time that the worker has spent in producing value that does not belong to him. The magnitude of profits can be increased by increasing intensity of labour, productiveness of the labour or by increasing the length of the working day. But no matter how these three variables shift, (relative) wages and profits remain in inverse proportion to each other. [2] Lower the wages, more the profit. More the labour-time that remains unpaid, more the capitalist gains. Once this is clear, one can start to see how “lack of time” that one class of the society faces is a gain for the other. The issue of “lack of time” devoid of class analysis leads to vague rhetorics [3] and empty solutions. All sincere critique must elucidate how the “lack of time” that the “poor” face and which affects their “well-being” is an inevitability under capitalist production. [4]

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It is argued that women are the most “time-poor” since they are ones who usually perform domestic and household work which (widely) remains unrecognized and unpaid. The burden of performing these tasks leaves them with very little time for themselves. Recognition, remuneration and provision of alternative arrangements of such work will lead to diminution of the time deficit that women face. Researchers by employing the methodology of time-use surveys have made proclamations like “rich women work harder than poor men”. [5] Such statements are as contrived as the terms “rich” and “poor” are abstruse. Women unarguably are burdened with domestic and household work, which to a very large extent remains gendered. However the premise that it is “unpaid” is false. Even though this work may not be remunerated directly, it is accounted for in the wages earned by the worker:

“The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour…In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.

Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.”  (Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 1847) 

Therefore, even if household and domestic work was to be paid for separately, it would lead to a relative decrease in wages, not leading to any sort of substantive improvement in the life of the working class. The gendered nature of the oppressive burden of household work can be understood as an effect of the patriarchal system but the cause of it lies in the exploitative nature of class relations under capitalism. The patriarchal system itself, at the outset, is a result of the historical division of labour within a class society. The condition of women being domestic slaves to their husbands will not be made better, in any real sense, by demanding for household work to be remunerated.[6] According to the calculations of the capitalist, it is already recognised and paid for in the wages of the worker. As explained above, the impoverished status of the working class is directly linked to the prosperity of the capitalist. Therefore, any demands for alternative arrangement or socialisation of domestic work that might emancipate women from their current state of slavery and proposals about providing free goods and services via public policy, remain incompatible with and a utopia under the capitalist mode of production.

The burden of “unpaid work” that leads individuals to face a “lack of time” is a legit issue. However, it cannot be understood in isolation from the process of production of which it is a part. Marx writes:

“All the slave’s labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage labour, on the contrary, even surplus-labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. There the property-relation conceals the labour of the slave for himself; here the money-relation conceals the unrequited labour of the wage labourer.” (Karl Marx, Vol 1., Capital, 1887)

It is this very phenomenon that can so easily lead one to think of household work (domestic slavery of women) as unpaid while overlooking the exploitative nature of class relations within the capitalist mode of production. The concept of “time-poverty“, which wrongly posits time as a commodity, furthers the concealment of the worker’s unpaid labour. The worker appears to be selling his time and not the value creating source that is his labour-power. It becomes easier then, for the price of this “time” to be detached from and determined independently of the value created by him. Terms like “time-poverty” when undisguised reveal themselves as nothing but plain, old poverty. Averse to the dilution and deviation that this term begets, one must not lose sight of the fact that the fight for personal and leisure time is inextricably tied with the fight for socialism.

Notes

[1] “...time-poverty among the better off accounts for very little of the total, and that genuine time poverty is more than a qualitative loss resulting from individual choices. Rather, most people who are time-poor are also income-poor and suffer from other (often multiple) deprivations.” Ghosh, “Time Poverty and the Poverty of Economics,” 2.

[2] “The share of (profit) increases in the same proportion in which the share of labour (wages) falls, and vice versa. Profit rises in the same degree in which wages fall; it falls in the same degree in which wages rise.” Marx, Wage Labour and Capital, 37.

[3] “Though it is difficult to say how much leisure or free time a person needs, one can say that a person who does not get enough leisure is under time stress.” Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 28.

[4] “Capitalist production, therefore, of itself reproduces the separation between labour-power and the means of labour. It thereby reproduces and perpetuates the condition for exploiting the labourer. It incessantly forces him to sell his labour-power in order to live, and enables the capitalist to purchase labour-power in order that he may enrich himself.” Marx, Vol. 1. Capital, 406.

[5] Ultra-poor women rank at the bottom in terms of burden of total work. They spend 32.74 per cent of their total time (53.42 hours) on work. They are followed by non-poor women (and not by ultra-poor men) who spend 31.66 per cent of their time (53.18 hours) on work. That is, rich women work much harder than ultra-poor men in terms of the time put into work. Hirway, Understanding Poverty, 35. Also quoted by Jayati Ghosh in “Time poverty and the poverty of economics” with an addition that “This partly reflects the lack of paid work for poor men as well as the greater burden of unpaid work borne by women in their own households.”

[6] “Payment for the housewife’s “reproductive labour” in the house, i.e. for domestic slavery, in addition to keeping the working family’s standard of living the same, and consequently the level of the housewife’s freedom on the same level as before, is something that would serve to perpetuate the idea of the housewife as the beast of burden that bears on her back all the social pressure exerted on working-class homes (including psychological and physical abuse). It would keep her away from social life, imprisoned within the four walls of her house, making her numb with chores that mangle her body and dull her mind.” Rey, Is housework an “unpaid” job?

Stalin in Ukraine: A Critical Examination of the Holodomor

By Anton

Republished from the author’s blog.

In this piece, I will examine the situation in the Soviet Union, particularly in Ukraine, 1932–1933, of what is commonly referred to as “Holodomor”.

“Holodomor” refers to the claim of an “intentional man-made famine-genocide in Ukraine caused by Communist collectivization of the Soviet Union” or often times more specifically, of Stalin himself.

To begin, I will start with its origins. Its origins are widely credited to a Welsh man named Gareth Jones. Who was he? Jones before arriving in the Soviet Union in March of 1933, he was in nazi Germany. In an article entitled, “WITH HITLER ACROSS GERMANY” which was published on February 23rd of 1933, he outlines his experience flying on Hitler’s private plane along with other high ranking nazi officials such as Goebbels. In the piece he says of the nazi leaders, “There is nothing hard and Prussian about my fellow-passengers. They could not be more friendly and polite, even if I were a red-hot nazi myself.” Continuing, after fawning over the nazis, he says regarding Hitler: “There are two Hitlers — the natural boyish Hitler, and the Hitler who is inspired by tremendous national force, a great Hitler. It is the second Hitler who has stirred Germany to an awakening.” In a following article by Jones, he states regarding Goebbels that “He has a remarkably appealing personality, with a sense of humour and a keen brain. One feels at home with him immediately, for he is amusing and likeable.”

After leaving nazi Germany, he arrived in the Soviet Union. After arriving, Gareth Jones reported that “millions are dying of hunger”. In the article he gives multiple anecdotes of unidentified and nameless persons — devoid of any information of any backgrounds, of their class interests, etc — making claims such as “we are waiting for death”, while presenting the entirety of not only Ukraine but the entire Soviet Union, as a monolith.

Following this, on the 13th of April of 1933, Jones expands in this article his claim regarding the cause of the situation. He states “the main reason for the catastrophe in Russian agriculture is the Soviet policy of collectivisation.”

Today, by the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, collectivization is pushed as being the sole cause of the situation. Despite this, Gareth Jones of all people, even admitted the following factors played a role: natural droughts in some areas, landowning kulaks who he says their “incentive to work disappeared”, “massacre of cattle by peasants not wishing to sacrifice their property for nothing to the collective farm”, and that “prices have dropped most in precisely those products, wheat, timber, oil, butter, & co., which the Soviet Union exports, and least in those products, such as machinery, which the Soviet Union imports”.

In the previously attached article from April 13th of 1933, Jones also predicted that the next harvest will likely be worse and stated, “The outlook for the next harvest is, therefore, black. It is dangerous to make any prophecy, for the miracle of perfect climatic conditions can always make good a part of the unfavourable factors.”

Jones placed the blame mainly on the Soviet policies of collectivization, but still admitted — unlike the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners of today — the previously stated factors. Today if you mention these factors, you are demonized by certain people as being just as bad as the people who deny the holocaust, that you are a genocide denier equal to a holocaust denier.

Here we have the following factors by Jones, aside from collectivization:

1. Drought

2. Exporting grain & co. for industry machinery

3. “Disincentives” among ex-landowners

4. Slaughter of cattle by disgruntled ex-landowners

Before moving forward, it is important to take into account the location and the era of which this situation had occurred. For centuries prior, the entire region had regularly struggled against famines and droughts, including in Ukraine. Due to the economic backwardness of the feudal era, the entire region was largely ill-prepared to overcome these situations. As Jones mentioned, the Soviet Union was importing machinery. This was true. The reason for this was that it was that industrialization, as part of the first five-year plan, was a key to improving the agricultural system and overcoming the famines which had been inherited from the pre-revolutionary era. In a sense, the decision was as follows: “Do not industrialize, save some food, and allow the famines to continue anyway, or do industrialize, sell some food, and try to overcome the famines as quickly as possible”.

According to anti-Communist Nicholas V. Riasanovsky in “A History of Russia”, he states that the Soviet Union went from being the 5th in terms of industrial power, to second, only behind the United States, within the span of the first five-year plan. This bares out in many ways that industrial production was rapidly expanding. The first of which is that after industrialization and the end of the second world war, the famines which had plagued the regions for centuries, had stopped. They did not worsen, or even continue. It is also made clear through the fact that the industry of the Soviet Union was capable of repelling nazi Germany to the point of pushing the Germans not only out of Moscow, but all the way back to Berlin and the Reichstag. Finally, it is also shown by official statistical data of the Soviet Union. Granted that many will claim statistics from the Soviet Union cannot be trusted at all or are entirely fabricated, the fact still remains that even the western capitalist governments such as the United Kingdom will begrudgingly admit that during the era “almost all heavy industries [in the Soviet Union] enjoyed substantial increases in production”.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

Regarding the issue of kulaks having no “incentives” to work, Isaac Mazepa, a hardline nationalist who had nothing but hatred of the Soviet Union & Communism, admitted the same as Gareth. He notes in the excerpt that kulaks and nationalists had first began murdering collective farm workers and Communist officials then eventually adopted a “passive” form of resistance. He openly admits that kulaks and anti-Communists had intentionally and knowingly left ‘whole tracts unsown’ and left “20, 40, and even 50 per cent” of crops to rot in the fields. To reiterate, this is not being claimed by a Soviet government official or a Communist, but by a leader of the Ukrainian nationalists and anti-Communists.

The Ukrainian Institute of National Remembrance has stated that “Starting in February 1933, in order to ensure the spring sowing campaign, assistance began to arrive in Ukrainian regions. It was designated for local party leaders and activists as well as for those who worked at the collective farms.” It is in this that we begin to realize the class character of the situation and understand a little more of the truth of the situation. Above, Jones noted that the ex-landowning class refused to work in collectives saying they had ‘no incentive’, then we have Mazepa stating that many refused to sow land and harvest grain in the collectives out of spite, then the Institute claims that the aid was given to what largely amounted to those who worked. In essence, the picture painted by these admissions is exactly what Louis Fischer had stated when he was in Ukraine in 1932, as shown below.

From “Fraud, Famine and Fascism: The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard” by Douglas Tottle

This begins to paint a picture of exactly who, largely but not exclusively, starved and suffered. Though “the kulaks starved themselves” is regarded as “Stalinist propaganda”, that is effectively something that the “holodomor-genocide” campaign itself has inadvertently through this admitted to be true.

According to the infamous anti-Communist Robert Conquest, he reaffirms that kulaks did in fact slaughter their own cattle out of spite.

“The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine” by Robert Conquest

Though some will undoubtedly claim that since these statistics come from the Seventeenth Party Congress in 1934 that it must be fake, despite Conquest even saying that the numbers are “supposedly lower than the reality”, it is shown to be evident due to the fact that Soviet documents report that the Soviet Union had to and did import cattle to attempt to replace some of that what the kulaks destroyed.

To summarize this far, it has been well-documented, even among anti-Communists of the early “holodomor-genocide” campaign, that in fact kulaks did refuse to work and actively acted to harm the production of the harvest, kulaks did slaughter their cattle out of spite for the collective farms, natural drought did impact the harvest’s quantity, and industrialization was crucial to stop the famines.

According to Gareth Jones, collectivization was supposedly the main reason for the situation of 1932–1933 and he said that famines would likely continue due to it. By the end of the year of 1931, according to official statistics, the percentage of farms that were collectivized was only at 52.7%. By the end of the year of 1933, the percentage of farms that had been collectivized rose to 65.6%. Had collectivization as a policy, in and of itself, been responsible for the situation, then it would only be inevitable that the situation would not only continue, but intensify and worsen. But it did not. Given that by the end of year of 1937 some 93% of farms had been collectivized, it would only make sense that if the situation from 1932–1933 had been caused by collectivization with only 52.7% of farms being collectives that in 1938 there would be a situation much, much, much worse and intense. But it wasn’t. Unfortunately, Jones was unable to witness this fact to prove his theory wrong for himself as he had passed away in 1935.

In addition, and despite some people (i.e., Norman Naimark) saying “The Soviet Union made no efforts to provide relief”, reports show that the Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food aid to Ukraine. In early February of 1933, Odessa and Dnepropetrovsk regions each received 3,300 tonnes of food aid. By the end of February, the Dnipropetrovsk region received 20,000 tonnes of food aid, Odessa received around 13,000 tonnes, and Kharkiv received almost 5,000 tonnes. Reports document that from February to June in the year of 1933, over 500,000 tonnes of food aid was sent to Ukraine.

According to archived documents, Joseph Stalin himself, along with Molotov, personally took it upon themselves to scold Joseph Vareikis, First Secretary of the Voronezh Regional Committee of the CPSU, on March 31st of 1933 for his objection to sending 26,000 pounds of potatoes to the Donbass region of Ukraine. These behaviors including, but not limited to, sending food aid and at that personally intervening to ensure food aid is being given, is fairly odd or strange behavior for, as the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners would say, a “genocidal maniac who wanted to kill Ukrainians”. Truly, there was no reason for Stalin to go as far as personally intervening in that situation as he did to ensure food aid was sent to Ukraine if he was genuinely trying to create a famine to crush Ukraine.

Regarding the issue of “intent”, on March 16th of 1932 the Politburo stated that “The Political Bureau believes that shortage of seed grain in Ukraine is many times worse than what was described in comrade Kosior’s telegram; therefore, the Political Bureau recommends the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Ukraine to take all measures within its reach to prevent the threat of failing to sow in Ukraine.”

This is one piece of conflicting evidence among many that was presented to Stalin and others of the Central Soviet Authorities. Conflicting reports of whether or not there was an issue, and if so to what degree or totality, by regional members and others in Ukraine casts doubt on the claim that Stalin was aware of the situation or that he was orchestrating it. Though the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin were suspicious of it being worse than some had claimed, they still pushed for them to be careful and cautious.

Following that, Stalin wrote on the 2nd of July of 1932 to Lazar Kaganovich and to Molotov regarding Kosior and Vlas Chubar stating “Give the most serious attention to the Ukraine. Chubar’s corruptness and opportunistic essence and Kosior’s rotten diplomacy…and criminally frivolous attitude toward his job will eventually ruin Ukraine. These comrades are not up to the challenge of leading the Ukraine today.” By this point, it is without a doubt that Stalin is aware of the situation and automatically began to critically evaluate the situation and isolate the problems.

Shortly after this, Stalin sent another letter to Kaganovich on July 17th and mentions to Mr. Lazar that “These shortcomings are a great economic (and political!) danger to us”. The claim that this situation had been an intentional and man-made situation on behalf of Stalin & co. does not square up with this. For if it was, Stalin would not be concerned of these “shortcomings” and would certainly not be viewing them as ‘dangerous’ to them.

It is at this point that it is also worth noting the distinction between squarely blaming Communism & collectivization for the situation and between identifying elements or persons within the government as being responsible in part for the situation, in the way that Stalin identified specifically Kosior and Chubar and specific failures produced by them that in part led to this situation being able to develop under their watch.

By August 1st of 1932, Stalin wrote, and quite poignantly & savagely, regarding Kosior that “Instead of leading the raions, Kosior keeps maneuvering between the directives of the CC CPSU and the demands of the raikoms — and now he has maneuvered himself into a total mess”. Stalin continues, ripping into Chubar, stating that “Chubar is no leader. Things are bad with the GPU […] Unless we begin to straighten out the situation in Ukraine, we may well lose Ukraine.”

At this point, it becomes beyond evident that Stalin is now aware of the situation, is actively concerned about the situation and worried, is actively identifying the problems that have allowed this situation to unfold as it did, and began taking steps to begin to rectify the situation.

The situation 1932–1933 being viewed as a “genocide to crush Ukrainian nationalist resistance” is further undercut by the fact that the situation encompassed the entire union in varying levels and degrees. Nevertheless of the varying intensities, it included but was not limited to, Siberia, the Volga, the Kazakh ASSR, etc. With that being said, it was then not a man-made famine from the start, as some pretend, to “crush Ukraine” nor was it manipulated and weaponized to do the same. We’ve seen the true cause of the situation, that the food aid sent from other regions less impacted to more impacted regions such as Ukraine, and that the Georgian leader Stalin, the “evil Russian chauvinist who wanted to crush Ukraine”, personally intervened to make sure food aid was being sent when a regional official within the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic objected to sending aid to Ukrainians in Donbass.

The situation in 1932–1933 did lead to suffering and some death. But the level of which has been grossly inflated and exaggerated, disrespecting the people who actually did suffer and perish — it belittles the truth of the situation. The estimated range of the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners ranges from 3 million to as high as 12 million, some even higher, like Conquest alleging 14 million. Regarding these tolls, “starved to death” is not always accurate or truthful — intentionally or not. At the same time, there was a record outbreak of over a million cases of typhus and typhoid fever, a dramatic spike from the prior years and higher than in the rest of the Soviet Union. This resulted in a number of people dying due to the diseases, but not from hunger. However among certain historians, it is not differentiated, or even often noted — intentionally or not. That in fact many of the people who “starved to death” were not all people who did.

In 2010, in the same ruling that the Court of Appeals of Kiev decided to qualify the situation as a ‘genocide against Ukraine, to crush Ukraine’, they also made some noteworthy admissions. In it they claimed that 10,063,000 people had “died”. However, their qualification for a “death” is rather unusual. They note that 6,122,000 of the “deaths” are unborn people. Not even unborn babies that did not make it, but a person never born, a fetus never even conceived. Approximately 60% of the “deaths” were not even people that were even born! This is unimaginably childish logic, equivalent to saying one person being murdered is actually 10 people being murdered because that one person being murdered may have had kids and they may have had kids too, etc. According with the ruling, that leaves slightly under 4,000,000 people they claim were actually alive. Of the usual death toll claimed by the campaigners, the Ukrainian court’s is only a third. Meanwhile the Soviet archives estimate that around 1,800,000 people died.

The death toll alleged by the Ukrainian court was approximately 4,000,000 and the Soviet archives estimated 1,800,000 deaths during this period, which includes from the typhus outbreak, typhoid fever, etc. The number of deaths during this period being so significantly lower than what today’s “holodomor-genocide” campaigners claim may be relevant to the fact that Jones himself had admitted on May 13th of 1933 that he never actually saw any dead people. Jones stated that “Mr. Duranty says that I saw in the villages no dead human beings nor animals. That is true…” continuing, he implies that the reason he didn’t see anybody who had died during his entire trip that all of the people who had died were buried before he had the chance to witness a single person who had died.

For whatever reasons, since the 1930’s, and even to this day, the “holodomor-genocide” campaigners repeatedly and constantly use photos from regions and eras which are not 1932–1933 Ukraine. Beyond simply ordinary people who falsely attribute a photo, whether it is intentional or not, it is also “journalists” and other so-called “experts” such as Anne Applebaum.

Anne Applebaum fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in Ukraine in an article she wrote for the British tabloid called “The Times”

Unfortunately, and for some reason, this is a reoccurrence throughout the campaign.

Anne Reid fraudulently using a photo of Russian children in the 1920’s as an example of “holodomor” in an article she wrote for the American rag “The Wall Street Journal”

Above all, the misusing of photos is truly horrific and reckless. In the carelessness, or even in cases of intentional deceitfulness, the “holodomor-genocide” campaign citing photos from the Volga in the 1920’s or using photos from other famines disrespects the people who had actually perished or suffered in the photos we see.

From the anti-Communist “Black Book of Communism” where it openly admits that Ukrainian nationalists conducted pogroms and sought to create an ethno-state and purge ethnic minorities

Before moving forward, we must address what and who the “Ukrainian nationalists” were, that the Central Soviet Authorities and Stalin wanted to allegedly “genocide”. One major manifestation of Ukrainian nationalism existed in form of the fascistic Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) — which eventually extended itself into the “Ukrainian Insurgent Army”, of which both collaborated with nazi Germany and actively participated in atrocities of the holocaust such as the massacre of Babi Yar. Before and during the Soviet revolution, before the OUN was formed, the Ukrainian nationalists perpetuated some of the most horrific pogroms of the early 20th century.

Website of the oun-upa.national.org.ua with bios of various leading members. In this bio, it states that Mykhailo Kolodzinsky was trained in fascist Italy — in 1932 through 1933 — along with the fascist Croatian Ustaše. This was in fact at the will of the National Executive of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists.

The Ukrainian nationalists had connections and ties to among other fascist organizations and leaders, the Italian fascist regime.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

The exact nature, the characteristic of what this rabid nationalism entails is fairly easy to understand — a similar variant of the nationalism by the nazi Germans.

From the book “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe

This becomes much more clear and visible after 1932–1933 in which the Ukrainian nationalists are emboldened by the rise of Hitler in 1933 and become more violent and destructive. As a matter of fact, through analyzing “Ukrainian nationalism” and what ideology came with it (fascism, pursuing an ethno-state, etc) and the acts of the Ukrainian nationalists themselves (i.e., violent pogroms against ethnic minorities, aiding nazi Germany in committing crimes in the holocaust, etc) further bares out the truth of what “Ukrainian nationalism” exactly entails and means and what the people who bore that identity did and believed in.

Prominent Ukrainian nationalist, Eugene Onatskyi, regarding what “Ukrainian nationalism” actually means. From “Stepan Bandera: The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist : Fascism, Genocide, and Cult” By Grzegorz Rossolinsk

Though the disdain for this nationalist movement by the Soviet authorities is brought up by “holodomor-genocide” campaigners, it is presented as if it was only the Ukrainian nationalists who received disdain. In fact, all sectarian ethnic nationalisms were treated in kind. German nazi collaborator Russian nationalist General Vlasov, in a similar sense to the Ukrainian nationalists, viewed Stalin and in fact Communism as being evil and the greatest threat to “his people”. In the civil war, the White Armies were largely a rabid Russian nationalist movement that the Red Army obliterated. When the White Armies failed, younger nationalists turned to German-style fascism; in Konstantin Rodzaevsky and the Russian Fascist Party were extremely nationalistic. Rodzaevsky was executed in August of 1946 after he voluntarily handed himself over to Soviet authorities after he had previously “fled” to land occupied by imperial Japan. Stalin, who was Georgian, also maintained an equal hostility to the rabid Georgian nationalist movement. It was Georgian Stalin who led the Soviet forces against the Georgian nationalist “August uprising” in 1924 and it was under Stalin that the rabid Georgian nationalist leaders were executed for their nationalistic treason.

The Black Book of Communism (page 231) counts executed and gulaged Russian nationalist nazi collaborators as ‘victims of Communism’

The idea that Stalin was uniquely hostile to bourgeois Ukrainian nationalism becomes less and less plausible as you examine Stalin’s hostility to the rest of the sectarian bourgeois nationalist movements, including the Georgian bourgeois nationalist movement.

Regarding the issue of “genocide”, we must first define it. According to the Genocide Convention of the U.N., it states “genocide” as being “intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group”. In order for something to be qualified as a “genocide”, it must be that there was intent to kill or otherwise destroy said groups. That is more like the European colonialists invading the Americas and telling the Native people, such as through the Spanish requirement of 1513, that they must “submit, or we will kill everybody”, as they did. As noted above, the situation had been created through various factors, none of which were intentional by means of the Soviet Union, but of which a couple included intentional acts by the Ukrainian landowning class & Ukrainian nationalists — again, even admitted by Jones himself. It’s also been established that the Central Soviet Authorities had sent massive amounts of food aid to Ukraine, and that Joseph Stalin himself intervened against regional authorities of the Russian region in order to ensure food was taken from Russians and being given to Ukrainians.

The issue of “genocide” specifically, as a qualifying term, the vast majority of countries on this planet have rejected it. Of the nearly 200 countries on this planet, the vast majority reject the “holodomor-genocide” claim. Of the ones that do, let’s examine a few of them briefly. You have the U.S. which genocided millions of Native peoples in the Americas, Australia which genocided hundreds of thousands of Native peoples, Belgium which committed a genocide in the “Congo Free State”, Canada which genocided Native people, Israel which is currently genociding Palestinians, etc. Regardless, even with these genocidal countries accepting the “holodomor-genocide” campaign, it remains that the vast majority of the countries of the planet do not.

Upon analyzing and breaking down the “holodomor-genocide” campaign’s theory and the implications, it becomes much more visible as a violent and dangerous campaign. The campaign claims that Stalin fighting bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalism was tantamount to genocide. However, when you break down this logic and apply it elsewhere, it becomes more visible as the foolish logic that it is. If Stalin destroying rabid bourgeois nationalism that sought to create an ethno-state in Ukraine, which was part of the Ukrainian society, was “genocide”, then what would that mean for the crushing of bourgeois German nazi nationalism, when that was part of German society and resulted “in part” the destruction of some Germans? This logic would then also foolishly and wrongly interpret, for instance, the Haitian revolution as “white genocide” since it targeted and destroyed the French colonialists. And so forth. The notion that any of these can be considered “genocide” is far from being logical or sensible.

The Central Soviet Authorities had stated on December 14th of 1932 that Ukrainization policy had inadvertently given legal cover to rabid bourgeois nationalist elements to organize anti-Soviet agitation, treason. In the decree which is cited by the campaigners as proof of a secret conspiracy to crush Ukraine, if you actually read it, it states that they recommend them “expel petliurites” (the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who had conducted pogroms under Symon Petliura) and others, and for them to carefully supervise the implementation of Ukrainization as to not embolden the rabid elements. It also states the following: “…instead of the correct Bolshevik implementation of nationality policy, “ukrainization” was carried out mechanically in a number of raions of Ukraine, failing to take into consideration the peculiarities of every raion and without the meticulous selection of Bolshevik cadres. This made it easier for bourgeois nationalist elements, petliurites and others to create their legal facades and counterrevolutionary cells and organizations.”

The Black Book of Communism openly portraying the OUN/UPA terrorists who participated in murdering Jews with the nazis such as in Babi Yar, where they set up the syrets concentration camp as heroic victims who fought against the “Communists and Jews”

This was evidently true as the fascist OUN had formed and began to rise under this policy which bourgeois-minded Ukrainian nationalists had exploited. These elements of Ukrainian society, the bourgeois-nationalist elements, that eventually collaborated with nazi Germany and sought to create an ethno-state had themselves proven in retrospect that Stalin was correct to be critical of them and their nationalist movement. They were not going to be happy until an ethno-state was created. This is the so-called “national liberation” movement of the Ukrainian nationalists which Stalin allegedly crushed, though the Ukrainian nationalists and the OUN persisted. This further demonstrates, in retrospect, that the so-called “national liberation” of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists who are portrayed as victims of “Stalinist repression” are less like a legitimate national liberation movement such as that of the Haitian national liberation and more like the bourgeois-nationalist nazi German movement which sought a distorted and truly fucked concept of “national liberation”, to create an ethno-state and remove ethnic minorities.

The “holodomor-genocide” claim of today is even more detached from reality than the campaigners of decades prior. The ethnic interpretation of the situation 1932–1933, and especially of the magnitude they claim and in claiming that it was an intentional genocide to crush Ukrainians, is far from the truth. The conception that a famine was created as a weapon to “stop Ukrainian national liberation”, above all, makes the assertion that the rabid Ukrainian nationalists of the OUN & co. were in fact “liberators”, good people, not evil like the German nazis. OUN-B leader Yaroslav Stetsko stated in July of 1941 that he supports “the destruction of the Jews and the expedience of bringing German methods of exterminating Jewry to Ukraine”.

The rehabilitation of the rabid Ukrainian nationalists such as the OUN & UPA is an inevitable consequence and implication of accepting the “holodomor-genocide” claim. This rehabilitation should be rejected, forcefully. The perception of the Ukrainian nationalists as being “heroes” rather than, as they actually were, pogromists and nazi collaborators who committed some of the most horrific crimes in the holocaust and sought to create an ethno-state, is highly objectionable. The “holodomor-genocide” claim, de facto, asserts that these people are “victims”. It’s at this moment that we begin to see exactly why the comparison between the “holodomor-genocide” and the holocaust is so incredibly insidious. The holocaust was the large-scale systematic killing of ethnic minorities and other groups of peoples, especially Jewish people, by the German nazis and their collaborators, of which included the Ukrainian nationalist movement. Meanwhile the “holodomor-genocide” campaign claims that the Ukrainian nationalists who perpetuated pogroms before the 1930’s and the crimes of the holocaust in the 1940’s are the same as their victims who they massacred in the holocaust.

In summary, we have established the following facts regarding the situation 1932–1933:

1. Natural drought played a role in creating the situation

2. Ex-landowning kulaks and Ukrainian nationalists did in fact refuse to work, murder collective workers, slaughter their own cattle, and otherwise actively sabotage the sowing and harvesting campaigns

3. Importing industrial machinery was the reason for exporting amounts of food in order to increase production as fast as possible

4. The cycle of famines which had existed for centuries prior and inherited by the Soviet authorities ended after the industrialization and collectivization policies had been fully implemented and the nazi invasion had ended

5. Under Stalin, the Ukrainization policy went into effect for over a decade before being changed due to rabid bourgeois Ukrainian nationalist elements exploiting it for treasonous activities

6. Stalin did not harbor any unique hostility to the Ukrainian nationalists anymore than he did the Russian nationalists who he fought in the civil war or even the Georgian nationalists who he fought in the August uprising

7. The Ukrainian nationalist movement in question was heavily tied to anti-semitism & fascistic beliefs before the 1930’s and exposed themselves in their true goals by aligning with nazi Germany in their hopes to create an ethno-state

8. Central Soviet Authorities sent hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food to the Ukrainians from other regions and Stalin himself personally intervened to scold a regional Russian official objecting to sending aid and made him send food

9. The situation of hunger encompassed the entire union to varying degrees, including impacting ethnic Russians

10. The situation in Ukraine during 1932–1933 was not intentional or man-made by Joseph Stalin or the Central Soviet Authorities

11. The overwhelming and vast majority of countries on this planet do not recognize this situation as being a “genocide”

The idea of “holodomor” as an intentional or man-made genocide which specifically targeted Ukrainians and was used to crush Ukrainian nationalists fails on multiple fronts. Due to the nature of this perspective, I am without a doubt positive that words will be placed in my mouth alluding to me claiming it was utopian or something of that nature, but I would just like to categorically say that during this period some people did die. Though we’ve established that a large portion of the people who did die were people from the ex-landowning class who refused to work or actively pursued actions to sabotage the harvest and lessen the production of food, which was unfortunately largely successful, as it played a major role in creating this situation, that did result in some innocent people suffering and dying. In my view, the situation of 1932–1933 was tragic, but the false claims, notions, and the ensuing logic of the “holodomor-genocide” campaign should be vehemently rejected.

From Atlanta to Palestine: Liberation By Any Means Necessary

[Pictured: US and Israeli soldiers conduct joint urban warfare training near Jerusalem. Credit: Tsafrir Abayov/AP]

By Alex Ackerman

On May 31st, the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the Atlanta Police Department conducted a raid and arrested three Atlanta Solidarity Fund organizers. The activists’ work has supported those arrested for protesting against Cop City, a $90 million police training facility planned to be built in the Weelaunee Forest, known as one of the “four lungs” of Atlanta. In 2021, the Atlanta City Council voted to approve the plan to build Cop City, despite overwhelming popular opposition. In an eerie echo of history, on June 5th of this year, the council voted to approve the funding of Cop City, culminating in $67 million of taxpayers’ money. Hundreds of Atlanta residents spoke for more than 17 hours in opposition, yet the City Council aligned with the ruling class and the forces of capital. 

The “Stop Cop City” movement opposes the construction of this facility due to the combination of environmental harm it stands to inflict and the heightened threat of police violence against the surrounding neighborhoods, whose residents are primarily Black. The imminent destruction of 381 acres of forest to build a mock city for police training epitomizes the United States’ settler-colonial legacy of theft of indigenous life and land. Cop City would strengthen police tactics and expand resources for urban warfare, which law enforcement currently utilize across the country, particularly against Black people. The raid against the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, carried out by a heavily armed SWAT team, marks an escalation of state-sanctioned violence, as those in power work to maintain the hegemony of the capitalist state at any cost.

The recent raid against bail fund organizers highlights the encroaching presence of fascism and the broader militarization of police. In the United States, police violence serves as a continuation of settler violence waged against internally colonized populations, particularly Black and indigenous communities. In January of this year, queer and indigenous forest defender and “Stop Cop City” organizer Tortuguita was shot 57 times by Georgia state troopers, who were carrying out a similar militarized raid of the protestors’ encampment in the forest that is slated for destruction. This execution exemplifies the necessity of resisting Cop City, as such indiscriminate executions will only continue and be systematized with the completion of the facility. On a national level, this escalation of police violence is evidenced by the fact that police killed more people in 2022 than in any other year on record, with 1,241 people murdered, 97 percent of whom were killed in police shootings. Originating from slave patrols, police in their modern context function as an extension of the state to terrorize captive populations, preventing any potential disruption of the capitalist status quo. When any threats to this domination arise, the ruling class will expend all available resources to quell the opposition. For example, 42 protestors face domestic terrorism charges after Atlanta police stormed a music festival held by activists in the Weelaunee Forest. Additionally, three organizers face felony charges, with the potential of serving 20 years in prison, for the simple act of placing flyers that identified Tortuguita’s killer on mailboxes. These tactics of repression reflect a concerted effort to crush the growing dissent of the Stop Cop City movement. In this manner, the police raids in Atlanta, the murder of Tortuguita, and the charges of domestic terrorism demonstrate the lengths to which the capitalist class will go to preserve their hegemony, weaponizing the police as a cudgel against the masses. 

The United States is not the only settler-colonial, imperialist force heightening state-sanctioned violence. Across the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israeli Occupation Forces (IOF) have carried out mass raids, indiscriminately arresting Palestinians and wreaking havoc through destruction, injury, and death in the dead of night. Specifically, occupation forces murdered two-year-old Mohammed Al-Tamimi, who succumbed to his wounds after being shot in the head. Furthermore, on Wednesday, June 7th, the IOF detained university student and ex-political prisoner Layan Kayed after ransacking her family home at dawn. The state-sanctioned inhumanity against the Palestinian people serves as a means of tormenting Palestinians, enforcing their subjugation by the Zionist entity with the aim of humiliation and demoralization. In essence, the cruelty is the point. These nightly raids comprise a fraction of the extensive violence enacted by the Israeli state and settlers, which are co-constitutive, whose goal is the complete eradication of Palestinians from the land. 

In addition to the raids, just this past week, Zionist occupation forces have assaulted Palestinians at apartheid checkpoints, uprooted more than 100 olive trees, demolished at least five family homes in East Jerusalem, and bombed a house in Ramallah. The IOF intentionally targeted and shot Palestinian journalists Mo’men Samreen and Rabie al-Munir, who were wearing their press uniforms, during a Ramallah raid. This attack is reminiscent of the deliberate and cold-blooded murder of Shireen Abu Akleh, another Palestinian journalist. These campaigns elucidate the reality of settler colonialism as an ongoing process of dispossession. Just as the United States arose as a European settler colony, so, too, does “Israel” share such colonial origins. In the monograph Zionist Colonialism in Palestine, Fayez A. Sayegh illustrates the alliance between British imperialism and Zionist colonialism:

“On the one hand, Britain, by utilizing Zionist influence in the United States and in France, would avert international rule in Palestine, on the pretext that a British-sponsored program of Zionist colonization required British rule in Palestine. On the other hand, by playing a catalytic role in bringing about the designation of Britain as the ruling Power in Palestine, Zionism would at last be able to embark upon the long-awaited program of large-scale colonization in the coveted territory under the auspices and protection of a Great power…For the Zionist settler-state, to be is to prepare and strive for territorial expansion.”

Though alliances have shifted with the emergence of the United States as the dominant imperialist power following the second World War, the primary contradiction of settler-colonialism persists. The existence of the Zionist state presupposes the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians, and the military aid supplied by the United States equips them with the resources to materially realize the decimation of Palestinian life and land. 

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From Atlanta to Palestine, the resistance against occupational forces is directly enmeshed in the material struggle for the land. As Frantz Fanon elucidates, “For a colonized people the most essential value, because the most concrete, is first and foremost the land: the land which will bring them bread and, above all, dignity.” The struggles against Cop City and for the liberation of Palestine are mutually imbricated, as they both demonstrate state-sanctioned, settler-colonial violence by imperialist powers. Furthermore, the collaboration between the US and the Zionist state is the result of the impetus to further entrench their domination over colonized and working class people. 

Situated in the very site of the Stop Cop City movement, the Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange (GILEE) illustrates this connection between the settler-colonial, imperialist powers. This joint project between Georgia State University and Georgia law enforcement facilitates international exchanges, subsidized by the Department of Justice, wherein the IOF and American police participate in cooperative training sessions. Not only do these settler-colonial states exchange tactics of warfare, but each also manufactures models of surveillance that the other can exploit against its own population. Specifically, the Atlanta Police Department created the Video Integration Center, a network of over 5,300 public and private cameras, after former Chief of Police George Turner visited “Israel” and observed the command and control center in Jerusalem. Such collaboration highlights the boomerang effect of colonialism, in which Palestine is used as a laboratory to develop technologies of surveillance and brutality that are imported into the imperial core and deployed against colonized and working class people. 

This boomerang effect remains far-reaching and reveals the interconnected nature of monopoly capitalism, imperialism, and settler-colonialism. Imperialist states and transnational corporations cooperate in a manner that serves their common interests: the perpetuation of their hegemony. Microsoft, for example, funded the startup Anyvision to produce technology utilizing thousands of cameras and facial recognition software to monitor hundreds of thousands of Palestinians across the West Bank and Jerusalem. Employed by Zionist occupation forces, this project directly infringes on Palestinians’ liberties and right to self-determination, especially when even a Facebook post criticizing “Israel” marks a Palestinian as a target. Anyvision’s executives stated themselves that Palestine was a “testing ground” for this technology. In an effort to dodge the backlash sparked by the revelation of Palestinian surveillance, Anyvision rebranded to Oosto. This technology now extends its reach internationally, utilized by both private companies, such as casinos and sporting stadiums, and the American government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security and Border Patrol. More recently, the emergence of Artificial Intelligence has engendered new ways by which surveillance technology can be wrought against the colonized. The Zionist entity has installed remote-controlled guns that use AI tracking systems to target Palestinians, with one gun located in the Aida refugee camp. Before long, such weaponry will also be used to target marginalized people and political organizers in the United States, such as those in Atlanta. 

The nature of monopoly capitalism is such that the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie entails cooperation between state governments and transnational corporations. Moreover, the alliance between the United States and “Israel” further speaks to their interdependence, characterized by their common weaponization of state-sanctioned violence. The United States funds the Zionist forces by appropriating $3.8 billion annually, the majority of which consists of military assistance. In return,  the Zionist entity functions as an extension of American imperial interests in the Middle East. Kwame Ture aptly describes the relationship between the US and the Zionist state in that “[t]he United States is the greatest dehumanizer in the world, and Israel is nothing but a finger of the United States of America.” In this manner, the shared tactics of state repression unite these settler-colonial, imperialist projects with the goal of solidifying their domination. The struggles in Atlanta and across Palestine, therefore, must be understood in the context of the international movement for decolonization and liberation from imperialism. 

Confronting the garish violence deployed by the capitalist state and settlers alike, resistance remains steadfast, despite the immense power and resources at the disposal of the settler imperialist empire. Organizers have engaged in a wide variety of actions in opposition to Cop City, including protests, juridical avenues, sabotage of police equipment and surveillance technology, and occupation of the forest through community encampments, which have been continuous targets of police raids. In a groundbreaking moment of direct action, forest defenders overtook a police outpost at the proposed building site, setting ablaze multiple vehicles, construction infrastructure, and a mobile surveillance tower. Pursuing avenues for political expression outside of bourgeois-controlled channels signals a shift in class consciousness and a growing understanding of the power of collective, organized action. 

Palestinians resist the occupation on a daily basis, incurring the wrath of Israeli forces yet prevailing nonetheless. The summer of 2021 saw the widespread mobilization of Palestinians across occupied territories, known as the Unity Intifada, resulting in global rallying cries for Palestinian liberation. This mass uprising evinced the revolutionary spirit of Palestinian people in their ongoing struggle for liberation. In September of the same year, six Palestinian political prisoners dug their way to freedom in an historic prison break, using six spoons as their only tools. Militant resistance continues to manifest across Palestine, illustrated by the Lion’s Den, an organization that gained momentum in 2022 after responding to heightened Zionist settler violence. These manifestations of popular revolt against state-sanctioned displacement and death explicate the will of the colonized in that no amount of brute military force can dissipate the steadfast conviction in the cause for liberation. 

To bring an end to settler-colonialism, imperialism, and all oppressive systems necessitates resistance by any means necessary. In an effort to maintain their illegitimate power, both settler-colonial entities criminalize this resistance with the aim of intimidating opposing forces into silence. The three Atlanta forest defenders arrested for flyering were detained in solitary confinement for multiple days, a purposefully torturous warning to every activist who dares defy the construction of Cop City. That these organizers faced legal retribution designates them as political prisoners subjected to persecution by the settler capitalist state. This form of state repression is rampant in Palestine, where over 1,000 political prisoners are incarcerated without charge or trial. In the face of this policy of administrative detention, detainees remain at the forefront of the struggle by organizing hunger strikes for their freedom. The deployment of this tactic across Atlanta and Palestine has only further intensified in recent years in response to growing resistance movements. 

The interconnected nature of these struggles highlights that resistance to imperialism requires solidarity across borders. The United States finances the Zionist occupation of Palestine, wherein weapons and technology are tested and subsequently imported back into the imperial core. Make no mistake: this fascist violence will not be contained only to Atlanta. If Cop City is built, the implications will reverberate not only across the country but also around the world. 

This escalation of state-sanctioned violence represents the fear of popular support and proliferating solidarity. Walter Rodney connects people’s political consciousness to their material conditions, explaining that “[s]o long as there is political power, so long as a people can be mobilized to use weapons, and so long as a society has the opportunity to define its own ideology and culture, then the people of that society have some control over their own destinies…” (255). If people take their destinies into their own hands, if people imagine a future free from capitalist and imperialist domination, these hegemons will crumble before our very eyes. Every martyr who has sacrificed their lives for the sake of this common cause against settler-colonialism and imperialism is not just a number, and they have not died in vain. The people with whom they shared a uniting goal uphold their memory by resisting every day until they achieve victory.  

Why Is Lula’s Government Environmentally Ambiguous?

[Photo credit: Grist / MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP via Getty Images]

By Diego Viana

On January 1st, 2023, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva walked up the ramp of the presidential palace to begin his third term as President of Brazil, he was accompanied by eight people who represented the diversity of the country's population. Among them was Raoni Metuktire, chief and spokesperson of the Mẽbêngôkre people of Northern Brazil (popularly known as “Kayapó”), who achieved international fame in 1989, when rockstar Sting took him on a world tour in defense of the Amazon rainforest.

The display of diversity was a response to four years of a far-right, nationalist government that trampled over the rights of women, the LGBTQIA+ community, and indigenous peoples especially. The new government began in a context of shock, in the country and abroad, over former president Jair Bolsonaro's open support of illegal miners who invaded the lands of the Yanomami people in the Amazon, poisoned their streams with mercury, and suppressed any attempt at resistance. The federal government knew about the spread of famine and diseases among the Yanomami and openly chose not to act.

For many on the Left, seeing Lula and Raoni hold hands brought hope. First and foremost, it felt like a whiff of reconciliation, after approximately ten years of estrangement. Like other social movements, indigenous rights activists felt that the Brazilian Left had betrayed them and given its support to the old hegemonic project of occupying the Amazon through cattle rearing, mining, and building inefficient and expensive hydroelectric power plants. On the other hand, Lula's first stint as President (2003-2010) was successful in reducing Amazon deforestation, especially after worrisome data presented in 2002 revealed that deforestation had cleared over 28,000 square kilometers.

Largely due to the efforts of the Minister of Environment, activist Marina Silva, deforestation fell continuously until 2011 — three years after she left her post. The government also, in accordance with the 1988 Constitution, helped restore the rights of indigenous Brazilians over their historical lands. The military reacted grudgingly, alleging that this would undermine national sovereignty. The agribusiness sector, who had their eyes on large tracts of land in the region, in turn responded by creating a "milestone thesis," according to which only the lands indeed occupied by indigenous groups in 1988 should be recognized. The Supreme Court is yet to judge the validity of this thesis.

The same period was nonetheless a time when a series of ambitious engineering projects in the Amazon, first developed as part of a national-developmentalist ideology held by the military dictatorship in the 1970s, were put forward, so as to favor a handful of monopolistic companies and the advance of agribusiness. Among these projects, the Belo Monte dam, built between 2010 and 2016 at an estimated cost of 40 billion Brazilian reals (roughly $8 billion), is probably the most well-known and also the most deleterious. Against continuous and vocal opposition from environmentalists and indigenous activists, these projects were accelerated under Lula's successor, Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016), also from the Workers' Party. Around 2012 or 2013, the president of the Workers' Party, Gleisi Hoffman, who still occupies that post today, referred to the indigenous and environmental activists who were fighting against Belo Monte as “minorities with unrealistic ideological projects.”

Representatives of agribusiness progressively assumed key positions in Rousseff's government. This culminated in the appointment of a landowner, Senator Kátia Abreu, as Minister of Agriculture in 2015. Abreu, who owns multiple large farms in the central plains of Brazil, was by then already known to her critics as "Miss Deforestation," with Greenpeace and other NGOs awarding her a satirical golden chainsaw trophy in 2009. In 2013, during a cattle auction aimed at raising funds for the expansion of what was dubbed “private security” for farmers, meaning armed groups historically known for massacres of the local indigenous and landless peoples, she echoed the Wannsee Conference by promising to find a solution to “the indigenous question.” The episode is portrayed in detail in the film Martírio, directed by Vincent Carelli.

Unsurprisingly, soy producers interpreted Abreu’s appointment as free rein to invade Guarani-Kaiowá lands in the Center-Western state of Mato Grosso do Sul. They proceeded accordingly, engaging in their usual displays of gun violence and neglect of indigenous health tantamount to biological warfare. It is remarkable how these tactics mirror those of the colonizers from centuries past. Since the 16th century, land grabbers eliminated indigenous settlements by distributing clothes and toys infected with smallpox and other diseases.

The anti-environmental policies culminating in the construction of Belo Monte distanced much of the Left from what was still, by far, Brazil’s leading popular party. Marina Silva, who quit as Minister of the Environment in 2008, ran for president against Rousseff in 2010 and 2014. In the latter occasion, she nearly made it to the runoff election, but was held back to a large extent by a smear campaign conducted by her former party companions. She reacted by announcing her support for the right-wing candidate, Aécio Neves, in a move that might have cost her most of her political capital.

And yet, after the traumatic experience of the far Right in office, Silva and Lula were reunited. That was not all. Raoni's presence in Brasília, the capital, expressed the new government's commitment to advance indigenous leadership. The administration also created a new ministry specifically designed to advance indigenous land claims, directed by activist Sonia Guajajara. The Federal Police, for years complicit in the crimes of landowners and illegal miners, resumed their operations, destroying equipment and removing invaders, aided by the national Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama).

One might expect Lula’s administration to further reconcile with the indigenous community by abandoning big engineering projects and fighting agribusiness. They appeared to be starting these efforts in November, when President Lula attended the COP27 meeting in Egypt and declared that “Brazil is back.” He also brokered the return of German, Norwegian, British, and American investment in the Amazon Fund, which was created in 2008 under the management of the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES) to prevent deforestation and foster sustainable economic activities. The government's stated environmental goals involve reducing deforestation in the Amazon to zero, eliminating land conflicts, and rewriting the tax code to favor sustainable development.

This is where the picture begins to blur. The powerful landowners of the soy-exporting Central-West region have long pushed for the construction of a 580-mile long railway named “Ferrogrão,” which loosely translates to “grain rail.” It would cut through the Amazon rainforest, including protected areas like the Jamanxim National Park, slashing the cost and time of transporting the soybeans to the northern port of Belém. Another controversial project would allow for oil extraction in the “Equatorial Margin,” in deep waters near the estuary of the Amazonas river.

In March, President Lula's transportation minister, Renan Filho, expressed support for Ferrogrão, arguing that it reduces carbon emissions relative to the current use of trucks. Also in March, the president of Petrobras, Brazil’s enormous state-owned oil company, told investors that the Equatorial Margin project is a priority, though still in an early stage. The company expects $3 billion in investment. Other projects, such as a high-speed passenger rail line in the Northeast region, put to the test a passage of Lula's victory speech from October 13th of last year:

“We will show that it is possible to generate wealth without destroying nature”.

It is not entirely unsurprising that Lula's government is sending contradictory signals, trying to balance the demands of traditional, conservative pressure groups with the aspirations of social movements. There are both objective and subjective reasons for the mixed message. Firstly, it is hard to overstate the political power of agribusiness in Brazil. While the country has undergone a violent process of deindustrialization since the 1980s, agricultural and mining exports have become a financial lifeline for national accounts. As the influence of the manufacturing sector waned, that of landowners expanded. Productivity gains owed to the national research agency Embrapa’s development of a resilient soybean variant adapted to the tropics has turned vast zones of the previously untouched West into a powerhouse of soy and cattle.

Secondly, oil drilling is one of the few remaining areas where Brazil still invests in cutting-edge industrial technology. Sidelining the oil sector might prove suicidal for a government that draws much of its support from trade unions, as the fossil fuel sector is a stronghold of unionization in a deindustrializing country. The government also envisages oil production as a guarantor of energy security, until renewables become the main source of energy — most notably, biofuels and wind power in the Northeast.

Keep in mind that Lula's political profile has always been far from the radical leftist that both his conservative detractors and many of his left-wing supporters, in Brazil and abroad, tend to see. It would be kitsch, but not amiss, to describe him as a master of conciliation. As a union leader in the late 1970s, he excelled at negotiating deals between workers and employers. This shaped his politics for years to come.

At the negotiating table, Lula’s ultimate goal is always to reach a stable agreement. He has never been confrontational and is certainly not a revolutionary. While this attitude can certainly be criticized and faces the obvious limitation of objective conditions, recall that his much more confrontational successor, Dilma Rousseff, was sacked. This contrast should be read as an indication of what Lula's political ability, as one of the most important left-wing leaders alive, actually consists of. With his grasp of the stakes and possibilities of Brazilian politics, he acts as a manager of conflicts, identifying where advancement is and isn’t possible — frustrating as this might be for his grassroots diehards.

Beyond the individual figure of Lula, the ambiguity of the Workers' Party's record on indigenous rights and environmental policy offers a glimpse of the high political stakes in Brazil, a continent-sized country that houses half of the largest rainforest in the world and — at the same time — is one of the widest frontiers of agricultural expansion today. The interplay of political pressure and economic power from both sides of the dispute exposes the aporias and contradictions of 21st-century capitalism with unusual clarity.

To understand how the conflict plays out in Brazil today, look to the government. One expression of Lula's notorious ability for compromise and conciliation is his capacity to translate social conflicts into internal disputes between his ministers. This was the case between 2003 and 2010, and is now happening again. But is it possible to be a conciliatory leader in a country that derives much of its resources from predatory activities and still deliver on your promises to the environment and indigenous peoples?

That tension led to a rift which broke out in May of this year, when Ibama denied Petrobras the right to proceed with studies about the viability and safety of oil extraction from the Equatorial Margin, citing technical inconsistencies in the company's project. Petrobras' president, Jean Paul Prates, who is also a senator from the Workers' Party, regretted the loss of a “golden opportunity” to develop the Northern state of Amapá. The episode shows that, even within the government and the Left in general, many still consider fossil fuels a source of economic progress and think of environmentalism as a hurdle. Petrobras later announced it would revise its application, allegedly addressing the issues raised by Ibama.

All of this took place while Lula was attending the G7 meeting in Japan. Without mentioning the crisis among his supporters, the President structured his speech, given in Kyoto on May 19th, around the problems of oil dependency, war, and climate change. Here is the opening sentence:

“When G7 was created, in 1975, the main global crisis revolved around oil. Forty-eight years later, the world still has not managed to get rid of its dependency on fossil fuels.”

His main point was to rehash the demand presented last year at COP27: that the wealthiest countries should make good on their pledge, first expressed in 2009, to allocate $100 billion to climate action every year. To his domestic audience, in contrast, Lula tweeted allusively about "clean jobs" and "exploiting the Amazon's diversity" so that the region's 28 million people can "work and eat." The tweet was a masterpiece of ambiguity, sounding like a diplomatic dispatch in its capacity to express nothing at all.

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This was not the end of the story. On May 24th, Congress took two worrisome steps that many on the Left interpreted as capitulation, especially since the government presented little to no resistance. First, a commission approved an interim measure that, if carried out, would force changes in the structure of government, removing important agencies from the Environment, Agrarian Development and Indigenous Peoples ministries, such as the registry of rural properties, the administration of water resources, and the demarcation of indigenous lands. These agencies would be reassigned to ministries where the bureaucracy is controlled by the agribusiness sector, such as the agriculture ministry.

Later that day, the speaker of the Chamber of Deputies, Arthur Lira, passed a resolution that accelerated a vote about the milestone thesis, in such a way that NGOs, social movements and indigenous organizations would not have time to mount significant protests that have so far prevented the project from advancing. By voting on May 30th, Lira would also get ahead of the Supreme Court, who scheduled their own vote on the constitutionality of the rule for June 7th. A previous favorable decision by the House might predispose the Justices.

While these moves were a clear show of how powerful the agribusiness caucus remains, the episode as a whole elicited a swift response from civil society and Silva. The Minister made a speech warning of possible international backlash to the impending environmental destruction. She acknowledged that the country is going through a "difficult moment." Nevertheless, she promised resistance, saying that "good trees grow with stronger winds." Lula, in turn, tried to project calmness by saying — during an event at the Manufacturing Federation of São Paulo — that the political game was only just beginning. Subsequently, he summoned the ministers of the areas concerned for an emergency meeting.

It is hard to predict where these various conflicts are heading. But it is significant that the President has consistently stood by his environmental minister in both disputes. While it might be premature to declare that these episodes will result in victories for Silva, they certainly do not yet represent the defeat many on the Left are seeing.

It is worthwhile to contrast this episode to 2008, when — as Minister of the Environment — Silva lost a similar battle, which turned out to be consequential. Back then, Lula chose to side with Rousseff, the Minister of Mines and Energy at the time, by opting to proceed with the construction of the Belo Monte dam. The defeat led Silva, who was still a member of the Workers' Party, to leave for the Green Party and also resign from her post.

After 15 years, Silva’s position appears to be stronger. What’s changed? The answer may lie in the forces Silva brings with her into the government and, as a consequence, into its internal disputes. Silva's reconciliation with Lula represents a tentative alliance between the Workers’ Party and the emerging subset of “green capitalism,” backed by a powerful faction of the financial and corporate sector.

The emergence of green capitalism created a significant fault line within capital itself. While fossil fuels had become somewhat disgraced — at least until the beginning of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict —, “green” or “sustainable” capitalism has presented itself as the sole alternative to the archaic, unproductive model of extractivism and commodity export to which Brazil reverted in the last four decades.

More recently, development projects promising to boost the economy without destroying the Amazon have come to the fore. These projects hope to multiply the yields and jobs in the Northern regions of the country, which would thus become the new epicenter of economic growth, estimated to account for approximately 14% of the Brazilian gross domestic product. The prospect of new fields for investment with potentially high returns has attracted the attention of corporate and financial leaders from the more developed Southeast region of the country, particularly the two biggest cities and main financial centers, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. 

Brands such as Natura (cosmetics) and Raízen (biofuels) have become household names, brandishing their fame as sustainable and green. The owners of these companies, as well as bankers like Maria Alice Setúbal (Itaú bank) and the orthodox economist Eduardo Giannetti, have become Silva's main interlocutors in the last decade and helped create her party, Rede Sustentabilidade. When Lula and Silva joined forces in the presidential campaign last year, these actors were brought closer to the Workers' Party, to whom they are in principle hardly sympathetic.

For Lula, the most important gain lies in recovering part of the capitalist sector’s support, which was entirely lost after the chaotic economy of the Rousseff years. At least some of this has already taken place. In the 2018 election, big money in Brazil sided overwhelmingly with the far Right to elect Bolsonaro. In 2022, the divide was less clear-cut, with many representatives of the economic elite in São Paulo declaring their support for democracy in the abstract and occasionally for Lula explicitly.

If this is so, then the President is currently trying to accommodate not two, but three social forces. Within the capitalist setting, he has to mediate the tug of war between two forms of exploitation of the land: the nearly monocultural soy and meat complex on one hand and the technology- and capital-intensive bioeconomic project on the other. This is the local form of the global impasse of demanding to divest from fossil fuels while upholding an energy-intensive lifestyle based on growth and consumption.

It is hard to assess how much of this conflict is merely superficial, as major investors have no scruples in investing on both sides. It is also unclear to what extent we are looking at an attempt to greenwash capital as a whole. We should not forget that even the cleanest of large-scale economic activities must rely on such industries as lithium, cobalt, and rare-earth mining, or palm tree plantations, where working conditions are often degrading and the environmental record is hardly better than that of the fossil fuel industry.

Which brings us to the third actor: civil society, particularly social mobilization and environmental activism. With the aforementioned vectors of capitalism as a background, what strength do these groups have to achieve their policy goals? So far, there are signs that they are more capable of achieving their aims today than they were two decades ago.

Even during the dark times of far-right government, yearly assemblies of indigenous nations in Brasília called “Acampamento Terra Livre” (Free Land Camp) helped to attract attention to their plight and might have been able to freeze the far Right's project to limit their land rights to the territories occupied in 1988 when the Constitution was adopted (after a particularly harsh period of expulsions and persecution during the dictatorship). But this does not mean that they are strong enough to push the government toward more aggressive action in their defense. In May, the agriculture minister Carlos Fávaro, himself a soy producer and representative of agribusiness, expressed sympathy for the "milestone thesis" in an interview and suggested that the President might also have a favorable view. 

Also, the Landless Workers Movement (MST), one of the most important social movements in Brazil pushing for land reform, has established itself as a relevant producer of food products — particularly organic ones. In March, after less than three months of the new Lula government, the leader of MST, João Pedro Stédile, declared that initiatives for land reform were “too slow” and that the movement would increase pressure on Brasília to secure more incentives for family agriculture and organic crops.

A wave of mobilization, including the occupation of unproductive properties, was planned for the following months. Needless to say, the MST is the most maligned entity among the Right, as it represents the opposite kind of occupation of the territory. In May, far-right Congresspeople approved the creation of a commission to investigate the movement, with accusations that go as far as terrorism.

It is no wonder that Raoni's presence next to Lula had such an impact on public opinion and foreign commenters. Yet, politically, the gesture was as pragmatic as ever. Nevertheless, the playing field has clearly changed, apparently in favor of the environment, even if one is justified in suspecting high levels of greenwashing.

If we recognize that the climate crisis runs as two parallel conflicts — one between two brands of capitalism and, the other, against capital itself — it is remarkable that Lula is once again internalizing both struggles in the structures of his government. While the fundamental ambiguity at the core of his politics remains untouched, it is permeable to outside pressure (ie, social struggle), the ultimate source of political change.

Diego Viana is a Brazilian economic journalist. He earned his PhD in political philosophy from the University of São Paulo and covers Brazilian politics, economy, and social conflict.